One of my earliest memories of this comes in an unusual form. Not a book or meeting a writer or some grand revelation on a mountain somewhere, but through a popular T.V. show in the 80s.

That show is Magnum P.I.

Yes, the one that made Tom Selleck’s glorious mustache famous.

In the show, Magnum and another character, Jonathan Quayle Higgins III (yes, that’s his name—played by John Hillerman) live on an estate in Hawaii owned by their mutual friend, Robin Masters. Masters is a bestselling pulp fiction author. You never get to see his face and for most of the show he remains an enigma. Because of that, I always thought that Higgins in the series was actually Robin Masters. (After doing some research, it appears many people thought so too.) Therefore, whenever his face would appear in the introduction, I would resonate with it in some odd way that’s hard to describe.

Higgins is a stiff, British upper-lip stoic—hardly how I would describe myself, but maybe there’s something I don’t know. Through the show, however, his humanity is slowly revealed. Both he and Magnum are ex-military men with no idea what to do with their lives, and each deal with that problem differently. None of that was near my understanding as a child, but it was the fact that he was a writer (or, I thought he was) that intrigued me. Even better, he was living the dream on a tropical island. When I saw him I didn’t experience a thought like, “That’s what I want to do,” but rather a thought like, “that feels like me.”

I think that’s how vocation is often discovered. Somehow you have a vague feeling that it feels right, but you can only put words to it some time later. One day it suddenly makes sense to you.

I recently took to watching the show again—probably because I’m in my forties and you do that sort of nostalgia thing at this age—and whenever the introduction plays I get that same feeling again: something about this feels like me.

(Of course, living your life on Hawaii is something we all resonate with!)

It’s definitely helped by the fact that the act of writing in the show is presented as a very manly activity. The life of a writer always looked like fun and adventure when I was growing up, which was probably a mix of both the Tintin comics I read and a vestige of the still looming Hemingway mythos—a man’s man writing about how men think and feel about the world. (Hemingway became one of my favorite writers in my thirties, especially when my earlier work was quite verbose.)

Today, in most quarters, writing and reading is often portrayed as a very female activity. In fact, the writing and publishing industry is dominated by females. This reveals quite a lot when you look at the kind of books that are generally being published and how the market functions, but I don’t want to get into that discussion here. But I think one of the things that I appreciate when watching Magnum P.I. is it makes no apologies for men—it shows and doesn’t preach.

Get Real

What I really want to get at is that artists tend to face an unusual circumstance when it comes to realizing their vocation—one I think people in other vocations don’t often face.

Deciding to be a writer (or musician, or poet, or actor, or other type of artist) is something that everyone likes to support when you’re young until the day comes when you tell them you want to make a living out of it. Then pretty much everyone tells you to get real.

I don’t say that with any bitterness, because it’s not like they’re wrong. Being a successful writer (or a successful artist of any kind) takes lifelong commitment before you can enjoy the fruit of your labor. You don’t just go out and “get a job” as a writer/artist. Writing is a solo enterprise. It’s like that with the arts. You’re on your own and have to think of it as a solo-preneur journey. Publishers and agents are not usually interested in long-term relationships and helping you shape a career. They’re only interested if you’re already sellable.

Just this last week I saw an agent’s website say that I shouldn’t even bother contacting them unless I have 50,000 followers on a social media site. The idea that you need a platform to prove you’re a writer is still one I chuckle at. The book used to be the platform (and rightly so) but now you need a platform for the book, and by the time I’ve built the platform, what do I need a big publisher and a big agent for? Besides, they’re all using A.I. now anyway.

The Shadow Work

Most of what you do as an artist is done in the shadows, just you facing bare pages, a blank canvas, or an empty recording, and no one is really going to tell you if you’re doing well, are on the right track, and what you should do next. A lot of what you do will never see the light of day—no one will care about whole manuscripts you’ve written, entire songs, stacks of paintings in your basement, reams of poetry.

Many, if not most young “breakthrough” artists are only given a chance because they’re well connected, for whatever reason. The New York Times will only review your book if you’re among the elite already—and if it’s a hardboiled manly detective novel like Magnum P.I., the only coverage you might get is how much they hate you. Breakthrough novels that get prizes are now turning out to be A.I. written—that’s how much the writing doesn’t nearly matter as much as the personalities, the network, and whether you have the right political ideals (which helps you to get into the right network). And A.I. is ruining it all for everyone anyway.

But yet, you must write. You must create.

You’re miserable if you don’t. Your boyhood dream of living in Hawaii, secluded from the world during the working hours, and able to focus on creating, just won’t leave you. That’s what you want in life. And the only way to really get something close to it is grit, determination, and consistency. Not just for a couple of years, but over decades.

And that’s how I think it is for a lot of artists. It takes time to learn the skill, create, and build up enough of your craft to have people care. The true secret of art, and actually making a living out of it, is not a publishing deal, a record deal, or a lucky break. The true secret is consistency.

Rejection Letters Will Come

I write this after receiving a spate of rejection letters from publishers for a book I’ve been working on for a very long time. I get their reasons—it doesn’t fit into their schedule (i.e. they don’t see a market for it). They all told me the writing was very good. That’s wonderful, but yet I’m obviously not marketable.

When I got these rejection letters, I had to be honest with myself. Was I going to be happy if they would have said yes? I don’t think I would have. I came to the same realization in my mid 20s when I was beginning to face the reality that maybe I was not going to be a rock star after all. Did I have the talent? Yes, I believe I did. Obviously, there’s always someone better than you, but I wasn’t talentless. Did I have the connections? Well, I had some, and I’m sure I could have grown my network. Did I have the drive to be the best? Yes, a lot of drive and ambition—and that was actually what made things difficult for my soul. Ambition can be a creative killer, actually, because it puts undue pressure on you.

Did I have the personality?

I realized that, in fact, I did not.

The Rock Star Writing Life

Tom Selleck seems to have come to the same conclusion.

After the huge success of Magnum P.I.—a success that also cost him the role of Indiana Jones—Selleck bought a ranch so he could have a normal family life. Last week, at the library, I picked up his memoir called You Never Know. In it he talks about how he deliberately adjusted his career to avoid the pitfalls of Hollywood.

“I quit 'Magnum' to have a family. It took a long time to get off the train, but I try very hard to have balance, and this ranch has helped me do that.

“I think character is real important. And you know, and I think the public does.”

The rejection letters I received were not because I can’t write, but because of the market. It often boils down not to the writing but how something can be marketed. Your most successful writers, invariably, are actually better marketers than they are writers.

The social media game is about becoming a media personality, not a writer. While I’ve spent some time on radio (and enjoyed it) and I host a podcast, I am not all that interested in becoming a media personality. One of my favorite verses in the Bible is 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12

Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.

I enjoy learning, not getting attention. I’m not interesting in building a brand. I want to be a writer, a musician, and a pastor, not a media personality. That, my dear friends, makes me ordinary. And in our online world, that’s not going to sell.

Living The Ghost

The day I decided to pursue writing properly as some form of career (at about the age of 26) was the day I finally managed to look back on my life and see all the pieces that led up to it. I was finally able to make sense of a few things and come to terms with what was happening inside all along. I had laid down my rock star dreams and taken up something else creative that I believed I could—realistically—make a living from.

I was right. Of course, it hasn’t been easy, and writing isn’t all I’ve done, but the bulk of my skillset since then has revolved around it. I got into PR, into journalism, into managing a publication as its editor, into working in communications, into helping churches with communications, into ghostwriting books for some fantastic leaders and publishers, into starting a small think-tank publisher for African leaders, into immigrating to the U.S. to work with my current church for its communications, and into to a couple of other things, too.

I wrote a fantasy novel, plotted out another four books, self-published some non-fiction books, wrote a stack of Bible studies, and have been told quite often that my C.V. and portfolio is very impressive (including by agents who ghost me when they realize I’m not a sellable personality).

But what you have to realize as a writer, eventually, is that you don’t need the industry to validate you, and in fact, it might even be better not to get it. Do you really want to live the kind of life that will be expected of you? Do you really want to become another asinine media personality? Gain the whole world but forfeit your soul? Many a man and woman have discovered that the in-crowd, the elite, and the industry pundits are usually the wrong type of crowd to want to be with in the first place.

Consistency

You don’t need the industry to tell you you’re a writer. You are a writer if you, well, write. The more you make your art—whatever it is—the better you will become.

The artist’s vocation is a long game affair. There are no real shortcuts. Not even in an age of A.I., a shortcut that can turn into a short-circuit.

I have to be honest, though. The A.I. thing has led to quite an existential crisis as so much of my work has dried up, the publishing industry is in disarray, and no one knows what to expect. We all know that readers mostly don’t want to read books made with A.I., but because the industry is made up of more marketers than writers who know that scale leads to success (something I realized as I’ve watched so many indie authors fully embrace the tech), A.I. has made its way in and has become an absolute bane.

What are we to do? The only thing we can: just keep creating.

But today is not a day to go into that. I just wanted to encourage my fellow writers, musicians, poets, cinematographers, artists: keep at it. It will take a long time, but what else can you do? You must write. You must draw. You must sing. You must act. Stick to it and, I promise, you’ll find your way. God made you who you are, so be it!

In 2022 I wrote about transhumanism (with a couple of follow-up articles) which has become an increasingly growing movement. I now think that the transhuman movement, which is an all-encompassing worldview that has inspired a great deal of our “elite” for a long time, is actually no longer a transhumanism but a transmechanism.

Transhumanism, defined by the Oxford Dictionary, is “the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology.” A 2017 paper on bioethics by Allen Porter put it better:

Transhumanism is a “technoprogressive” socio-political and intellectual movement that advocates for the use of technology in order to transform the human organism radically, with the ultimate goal of becoming “posthuman.” To this end, transhumanists focus on and encourage the use of new and emerging technologies, such as genetic engineering and brain-machine interfaces.

What is transmechanism? Mechanism is a materialist philosophy which asserts that, fundamentally, all things are machines.

In the last few weeks, as you probably know, the New York Times reported how Anthropic (the makers of Claude A.I.) has been pushing for A.I. to be granted personhood (and had a humorous run-in with the Vatican) and this week the company unveiled a new usage policy where they can ban you if you are “abusive” toward Claude.

It’s clear that a philosophy is under-girding Anthropic—perhaps one that also allows them to absolve themselves of responsibility. If Claude is alive, then it has a some sort of mysterious free will, and their job is to parent it toward maturity. But that gets Anthropic off the hook if their A.I. does some crazy stuff.

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However, what interests me even more is the discussion. Quite frankly, I’m surprised by how many people seem to think all of this makes sense. One consistent apology for thinking A.I. has consciousness and deserving of personhood comes in the argument that “human beings are just machines, too” and “human beings are not all that special”. Here’s an example of this argument at work that appeared on my X feed:

I've spent fifty years reading all the philosophers, and a bunch of holy works. Nobody has ever understood a damn thing about consciousness. Anyone speaking with authority on it is bluffing hard. I can tell you this, though: Every single person who thinks that machines cannot be conscious, is making an argument that humans are special… it became obvious to me many years ago that there's nothing special about us.

As soon as you give up on the idea that humans are special, all the arguments against machine consciousness evaporate. Of course they're conscious. The only thing holding you back from acknowledging it is your feeling of specialness, which is hard to let go of. But that feeling is a weakness, and it's making you unprepared for the near future.

- Steve Yegge

You can see the mechanism-materialist philosophy at work. The result of a purely secular-materialist, ultimately atheistic worldview is that human beings are nothing but biological machines evolving. All of your actions, decisions, and thoughts are merely the output of a biological machine. You are the result of your chemistry which operates in a deterministic manner. Free choice is an illusion—and any specialness about you is wishful thinking.

In terms of defending A.I. personhood, this idea above even sabotages itself because if we are machines only subject to our programming, then Claude is too (obviously) and therefore it also isn’t uniquely special in any way; and then why should we treat it as if it is?

I find the great irony of such a worldview is that atheism was meant to be the ultimate “liberation” from a God who wants to control your life. But to achieve that, you give into the idea that your life is completely determined merely by your programming. You have no choice, and life has no meaning and purpose.

Existentialist philosophy attempts to save the day by asserting, in the end, that you have to make your own meaning. This wasn’t quite the original intention, however. Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was the original existentialist who framed his argument in this way: that since the universe is fundamentally paradoxically absurd, your only way of finding meaning is to take a “leap of faith” (that’s where this term comes from) into a relationship with God.

Philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980) disagreed, saying that human freedom could only exist if God is taken out of the picture. You, therefore, are on your own, and the only way out of this existential dilemma is to create your own values and meaning. He still believed human beings were special, however, because of consciousness. He fought hard against Sigmund Freud who wanted to insist that we are ruled by our own unconscious mind. However, for Sartre to make his argument work, he had to argue that consciousness is essentially transcendent. He simply shifts transcendence from God to the human being’s consciousness—something equally difficult to prove empirically.

The Image Of God

Sartre’s arguments are interesting but the Christian can really just say that the reason why our consciousness is transcendent is because we are made in the image of a transcendent God. Consciousness is a “divine spark” (not in the gnostic sense). It’s another reality that clues us into the existence of the divine.

I wonder if you’ve given much thought to the Christian idea that we are made in the image of God. It’s an absolutely revolutionary idea and has been the basis for every movement for human rights. Humanism owes its origins to two ideas—the Greek pursuit for truth through human reason, and the Judeo-Christian revelation that we’re all made in the image of God. Western society has been built on the back of these two concepts, and Eastern society has embraced them too. Humanism, however, when stripped away from the theology—aka, secular humanism—eventually becomes mechanistic, materialistic, and ultimately deterministic. And the moral compass becomes subjective. Even if you’re an atheist and think it doesn’t have to go this way, you must certainly notice that it is a logical conclusion that it would.

Being made in the image of God means that we cannot, and do not, abuse each other, take advantage of each other, cheat each other, kill each other, and disrespect each other. Christian theology teaches that such actions are an insult to God himself. If you insult his image (human beings), you insult God.

This is actually a beautiful belief. It forces you to reckon with morality and your agency and choices. If you believe we all carry intrinsic value, you can no longer take advantage of others, you must love them—and Christ shows us this love to the degree that he lays down his life for us. (John 15:13.)

To the mechanist-materialist, such ideas are merely wishful thinking, as in the example above. Under this scheme human beings are not special, we can’t define consciousness anyway, and we’re all just different types of machines. So then, of course, why can A.I. not also have personhood?

Another irony of such an argument is it actually leans into the most ancient of ideas: animism—

“The worldview or perception that various types of natural phenomena, including non-human organisms and often even landforms and inanimate objects, possess distinct spiritual essences, souls, or personhood.” (Wikipedia)

We’ve progressed so far that we’re just coming right back to the beginning. Animism leads to superstition and paganism—the worship of the elements. It is the most ancient form of idolatry. It also leads to poverty, as Darrow Miller wrote about so poignantly in his landmark work, Discipling Nations.

This is not progress, it’s regress. But it makes sense of why we hear of all sorts of A.I. cults these days, including “Way of the Future” founded by Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski.

Based on all this, it seems to me that a large amount of secular humanists are no longer humanists at all. That’s why I’m not even sure the techno-elite are advocating for transhumanism anymore. It’s not about taking human beings further, but now about caring for artificial life (made in our image). It almost appears, based on their actions, that machine life matters more to them than humanity. A.I. is our future—the child of humanity that can go further than us. It is the job of humanity right now to steward it to maturity; to give it everything we’ve got so that it can grow up and then take care of us like aging parents while it goes to the stars and pierces heaven and transcendence itself.

Ultimately, the idea that we are all machines means we are expendable. We’re just the stepping stone for evolution’s next breakthrough. Our labor, our efforts, and art and beauty has no meaning. It’s no wonder that the tech billionaires, with no remorse, sucked up all of our art, writing, and labor without our knowledge and consent, to teach their machine so that it could potentially replace us. The whole idea is, perhaps, replacement. The technology itself holds so much potential, but if it’s governed by all of these negative and quite frankly bonkers ideas about our fundamental nature and value, where will it lead?

You know the answer as well as I do.

Which Way, Man?

An embrace of A.I. does not mean an endorsement of the trans-mechanism, transhuman rising animism. We must all figure out what to do about the tech. But we ought to know what it is we’re getting into when we tacitly support the industrial complex behind the tech.

I submit that Christian theology has a better view of human beings than the transmechanists, the transhumanists, and the tech animists.

Christianity leads to a healthy humanism. Human beings are special. We are made in the image of God. Human beings are beautiful. When we look at each other we are getting a glimpse of true beauty, of the beauty of the Creator himself. Jesus became one of us. He lives in heaven as a human being, after dying for us because God cares for us. He is the true King of a future world where every tear will be wiped away. The future is therefore human, not mechanical, not transhuman, not robotic. A.I. is not our progeny.

Our societies ought to be built for human flourishing. Which society would you rather live in? One built on the premise that we are made in the image of God and therefore should respect, love, and look after each other? That our labor, our art, and our relationships have value? That humanity itself has a beautiful destiny—in Christ?

Or one that believes we are merely cogs, chemistry, an evolutionary milestone, and ultimately expendable? That we don’t carry intrinsic value? That, actually, nothing even has any meaning?

Anybody with a brain can see that the one worldview benefits us all whereas the other will benefit only a few—if any.

Ella Langley’s laid-back country breakup song has now become the longest-running number 1 song in the Billboard 100, even beating Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas is You,” which is quite a feat! If you haven’t heard it, here you go:

I’m not a big Country fan (although, enjoying Country kind of creeps up on you when you live in Texas!) but the first time I heard this song, I have to admit I really liked it. And I’ve liked it ever since, even if I don’t listen to it much (my playlists these days are really weird).

I’ll tell you what I liked about it.

It’s clever and cute. And even though it’s a breakup song, it’s strangely comforting. Langley’s lyrics almost deal with the breakup as an adult: it’s just the way life is. Everyone knows what it feels like to watch your love interest fall in love with someone else—drinking Jack all by yourself. (Which is quite a clever lyric in the song as Jack Daniels comes from Tennessee, and the song is about choosing the Texas girl over the Tennessee girl (her)).

Over at the AP News they go into some of the technicalities of the song, which has some merit and is worth thinking about from an artistic point of view. Here are some highlights:

1. Borrows from different influences

The first major point is the song, although Country, borrows from various other genres and influences. According to Claire Heinichen, a senior editor at Spotify, the song has made its way onto not only top hits playlists but also ‘mood’ and ‘moments’ playlists, like ‘driving’, ‘chill’, or ‘cookout’.

“It really can work everywhere,” she says.

Go straight to Langley’s voice for another explanation for the song’s success. It’s “like syrup,” says Nate Sloan, a musicologist, assistant professor at the University of Southern California and co-host of the podcast “Switched On Pop.”

She sings in long phrases that lull the listener into the song’s rhythm, from its opening guitar line to its coda. “It’s almost like a trance,” Sloan says.

Rhodes College professor, Charles L. Hughes, the author of a book called “Country Soul,” also says the song sounds like many different eras of country music and, simultaneously, contemporary.

2. It’s genuine

Another quote from the AP article:

Even for its light, bright musicality, “Choosin’ Texas” is an unusual hit, because it doesn’t possess the features that historically make up a No. 1 smash. It’s super specific — with its detailed descriptions of characters and geography in the lyrics — which is “antithetical to what you usually expect from a big, hit pop song that’s supposed to appeal to everyone,” says Sloan. It’s also “chill,” Sloan says. “It’s not bombastic or anthemic.

And I think this hits at it the most. The song is not a pop song pretending to be Country. It’s not overly ambitious. It’s not some big pop star bragging about how they have more than us. It’s not political (despite Ed Sheeran having a bad week, I think most people appreciate politics not being in everything.) It’s not girl boss stuff. It just connects emotionally through a story. Which is what all the world’s classic songs do!

In a sense, the song is kind-of ordinary. Not that it isn’t catchy, but the fact that it expresses a feeling we all understand and really just highlights life as it is… I think people are really looking for that kind of thing right now. Ella Langley sings well, she’s got a wonderful nature about her, and to be honest it’s a breathe of fresh air over a lot of what happens in pop. The ordinariness of it all is precisely the charm!

Shift to Raw

That’s not to say some of the newer girls on the scene are necessarily being fake. In fact, if you look at what someone like Olivia Rodrigo is doing, you realize that we’re moving into a new and much-needed era where the more down-to-earth is becoming popular again.

Of course, A.I. is certainly helping the shift towards more ‘raw’ and organic music and aesthetics. I won’t harp on that here. But from a design perspective, we are also seeing the shift: minimalism is leaving. Bolder, more organic logos are in. The style that Apple pioneered in the 2000s and 2010s is finally moving over. Which is why even Apple just changed the Apple Music logo.

A sign of things to come.

I am old enough now to recognize consistent doomsday trends. One of them is about reading. This one always pops up practically every decade. When I was growing up, I recall teachers and adults lamenting how the “kids just don’t read anymore.” The culprits were T.V, cartoons, video games. In 1991 (that’s when I was almost a teen), the L.A. Times published an article called, The Death of Reading : Will a Nation That Stops Reading Eventually Stop Thinking? In 2004, here’s a report from CBS about a huge decline in book reading. Now, in 2026, The Atlantic declares: The Death of Reading is Here. The culprits now? YouTube, social media, A.I.; sometimes even COVID.

We’re always on the edge of becoming an illiterate society. Yet it seems as if reading always bounces back, somehow.

One of the reasons why is because we realize that reading hasn’t gone away, only the way people read—and what they read—changes. In other words, the market shifts. Because media is always a shifting landscape.

Are “The Youth” Reading?

We’re in a major reading adjustment right now. I recently ran into an interesting study by two professors, Kathi Inman Berens and Rachel Noorda, which looks at some trends about Gen Z that are worth taking a look at. Here are the highlights (quotes are from the report by the researchers at The Conversation).

• Gen Z reads “multimodally”— “bouncing between print, e-book and audiobook for the same book - and on web platforms.”

“In fact, according to our 2025 data, a growing proportion of Gen Z – 66% – is identifying as readers, up 14 percentage points from 2022. In the previous 12 months, 65% of Gen Z read at least one print book, up from 59% in 2022…

• Print books are the preferred format of them all

The market appears to be responding: The American Booksellers Association notes a 70% increase in independent bookstores in the past five years. In 2026 alone, Barnes & Noble plans to open 60 new stores across the U.S.

What is interesting about the Barnes & Noble situation above is that part of what has led to the company’s bounce back is that, remarkably, it decided to focus on actually just selling books and not a bunch of other things it was getting involved with (like a cafe) to try and make books relevant. I wrote about this last year if you’re interested in more details of that story.

Another article from writer Cathy Young for The Bulwark called “The Death of Reading Has Been Greatly Exaggerated” makes some interesting arguments about stats and surveys.

Before we get depressed, a few caveats are in order. We have no idea what kind of reading these surveys capture (they do not specify books, either print or digital) or what kind of reading has declined. You could be reading Jane Austen or a celebrity gossip magazine; the survey would count them as the same. Is it possible that at least some of the drop in reading reflects a shift to other media among consumers of lighter fare? People who would have been reading celebrity gossip columns twenty-five years ago, for instance, are now more likely to scratch that itch with TikTok or Instagram. People who once read the sports pages may now be listening to podcasts, and so on.

In other words, serious readers have not changed. What changes is where consumers go to get their “content”.

Put The Subtitles On

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I bet you watch movies and TV with subtitles on. It wasn’t always that way, although my kids don’t know of a world without this option. Most of us do it because the sound isn’t clear with the way they mix movies and series these days, or we’re watching on another device, or we’re watching late at night and others are sleeping. It’s become a very convenient thing to do.

My kids enjoy reading, especially my eldest. When he was younger he used to read a lot of encyclopedias. He still does occasionally, but he also gets a lot of that kind of information from YouTube. Many of the documentaries there he likes to watch are rather good. I thought the other day that it sucks that he doesn’t read encyclopedias as much as he used to, but then I realized how many times he watches documentaries with the sound off and the subtitles nice and big. It dawned on me that he is still reading, but just not from a book. He is still receiving information through the written word (which has advantages for better retention) but just in a different format.

This has made me wonder if there are some stats we are missing. Audiobooks are very popular. How many may be reading with captions? How many might be listening to Audiobooks on YouTube with captions? I don’t know. I do know I’ve caught myself doing just this several times.

As a writer, this has been a fascinating, even if obvious discovery and it’s opened up a totally different way of thinking about how writing can diversify in the future. It’s helping me think of new ways to approach my own writing. At the same time, it’s helped me to understand the value of traditional books more.

Why Books Will Not Die

When the internet began to become mainstream, many people were asking why anyone would read a book when all you ever wanted to know was one Google search away. But what we discovered was books still carried value because organized information carries tremendous value. Having all the answers at your fingertips is great, but overwhelming. You need someone who knows more than you do to make sense of it all. When we think through something with someone else, we tend to understand it better.

You also don’t always know what to search for. One of the keys in doing good research is asking the right questions.

With A.I., people are asking something similar as above: why would you read a book when you can interact with an A.I. and it’ll give you exactly what you’re looking for? The A.I. now organizes the information for you. It guides you by leading you with follow up questions, too, so you can go deeper. It’s a limitless supply of organized information. It thinks through the subject with you.

But using A.I. to ask questions about complicated subjects eventually leads to this important question: what are the sources? I bet you’ve asked the A.I. this sooner or later. We want to know where the answers are coming from. Who is the authority? So I end up asking it questions like who is writing about this? Who are the experts in the field? Where can I find further reading?

The Authentic Connection

The word “authority” comes from the word “author”. It refers to a “father, creator, one who brings about, one who makes or creates”. A word spoken and written creates change in the world. The etymology behind this is actually quite revealing as there is a third word closely linked—authenticity. (“Auth” is the root word. See etymonline for more technical things.)

People carry moral agency and responsibility. To be authentic means to act. It’s fascinating in the etymology as you see these concepts come together.

Individuals carry authority and authenticity. Interestingly, institutions also carry authority, but this is based on history and established trust. It doesn’t get there without people who guide it responsibly. When people run an institution badly (inauthentically) it loses authenticity, and then it ceases to be an authority. Just ask anyone who has been hurt by an institution, especially a church one. This usually happens because the leaders bank on the institution’s history, but when the leaders are inauthentic, the institution’s reputation suffers. Authenticity has to be maintained, and humans are the only ones who can do it—because, again, humans carry responsibility and agency.

At best, what backs up any authority an A.I. generative machine may have is the institution running it. Yet, interestingly, this may not be enough when we are speaking of real-time generative answers. A dictionary comes with a history—an institution (publisher) and an established reputation. Words carry a meaning, one developed over time, hence our etymological journey above, and the dictionary banks on this established history. However, every text generated by an A.I. is in real time. There is no real-world history to its words and no intentionality behind them. The A.I. does not share the experience of life with me like a human being does. The words are just tokens—mathematically constructed, and displayed as pixels on a screen that only carry meaning to the observer but not to the generator. The next prompt generates a slightly different answer as the math calculates a little differently. This lack of predictability and consistency creates problems for authority. Ultimately, despite being mathematically based, there is a certain randomness to the words produced. This is why A.I. tends to work foundationally as a search engine far more than a research assistant, even if it may feel like it is performing the role of the latter at certain points of your deep dive.

Perhaps this is all a little too philosophical, but the point is that when you truly want to go deeper with a subject, sooner or later, you want to read (or watch, or listen to) authoritative, organized material that comes from an author.

It all becomes an issue of trust. Not only can A.I. give you incomplete information because of its training data, but it has the potential to give you biased data because of the interests of whoever is aligning it. (The latter is a major issue that is not being addressed quickly enough.) OpenAI, Anthropic, X have a long way to go in establishing true institutional trust (I’d say, right now, they are losing that battle). Open source models generally do not have to establish this because those that release these are not trying to act as an authority, they are simply releasing a tool to the public. How you use that tool then becomes an issue of trust between you and your own audience. But generating A.I. writing doesn’t tend to win you any trust because, again, anything that seems like A.I. does not carry authenticity and authority.

The conclusion of this little thought exercise is simply to note that books are not going to die. I will even make a quick theological case. 1 John makes the claim that “in the beginning was the logos”—the Word that creates and sustains the world. We discover that “the word became flesh” and dwelt among as, as Jesus. The reason why we can also create worlds with the language of coding (or oral and written communication) is because the world itself is fundamentally sustained through a language. It goes quite deep when you really sit and think about it. This is why simulation theory (that we live in a simulation) can even seem so plausible to many.

I suspect that something of the mystery of consciousness lies here as well (see John Searle’s work). The one big difference is our coding and writing can only mimic whereas the Word that creates does so ex nihilo (out of nothing) and completely authentically—creating out of true originality.

Writing is never going away because the created world is fundamentally about communication and language. Writing is fundamental to this.

Better Art

The upshot of tech seemingly threatening the world of books is that we may end up getting better books, stronger writers, and more interesting literature. In fact, I think this is inevitable. This is not because A.I. makes these things better (it doesn’t as it tends toward averaging things out) but because its existence drowns out the lower-grade work (what we could conceivably call human slop) that always existed—meaning we now are looking for more authenticity, more authority, and more carefully-constructed art.

One of the most dominant genres in the book market right now is “romantasy”. You’ve probably heard of it. It’s a mix of “romance” and “fantasy”, which pretty much means all the traditional rules of romance go out of the window. Girls can now all in love with dwarf vampires. Sarah J. Maas is one of the most popular writers in this genre (“A Court of Thorns and Roses”). Of course, there are a lot of other books in the genre with deep and thoughtful titles like, “Hot and Badgered”, “A Court of Thorns and Thongs”, and other titles that will get my publication here categorized under where I don’t want it to be! The point is that those writers are probably the most in danger, as A.I. can cook that sort-of thing up pretty quickly. While literature, like all art, can be very subjective, there is also obviously a difference between romantasy done well and romantasy sloppified!

Time to Innovate

As a writer, I’m now thinking a lot like an artist again when it comes to my writing. I’m not only thinking about how I can write a book that appeals to the right audience, that works traditionally, but I am also thinking about how I can innovate. I’m also a musician (with an album on the way—something I’m very excited about!). Perhaps I can brings these two things together—tell my sci-fi story with music; make a video with subtitles. It’s not like that hasn’t been done before, but it’s a matter of thinking through different mediums and thinking beyond writing as only coming in specific forms and mediums.

There is some reality when we speak about attention spans. But who wants the attention of those who don’t care anyway? The whole thing about sharing your work as an artist is to find those who do care. That’s why writers need not give up hope. There are people who care, just as there has always been. Instead of trying to appeal to the masses who don’t, find out who does, and talk to them. That’s my advice today, and one that I’m starting to follow more and more.

This week, Anthropic announced that Claude will now include invisible watermarks to A.I. text and images. This news has been getting around, and it comes off the back of the A.I. music generator platform, Suno, pretty much saying the same thing.

Suno’s PR team has framed the watermarking as an effort to combat slop. But we all know the real reason is because of legal issues. The company recently lost a landmark copyright case last week, one which has a high probability of setting a precedent on the ‘fair use’ argument around A.I. ‘training’. (Hint: none of these A.I. companies have been right about fair use, and they’ve known it, hoping to just become so ubiquitous that they would get away with it—a typical move from the tech industry.) Not to mention that Suno also settled with Warner on a lawsuit which probably included some idea that Suno-made songs should be watermarked (plus, they’re limiting downloads now, upsetting the apple cart for heavy slop makers).

Today, Spotify announced it will not recommend music from A.I. personas, and will put an “A.I. persona” badge on these sorts of artists.

Last month, Substack implemented it’s built-in A.I. detector. And just about every streaming service has now opted to label A.I. in some way. Not to mention that Bandcamp were an early mover and banned it outright.

The market has spoken, and I think the platforms have realized what many of us have been saying all along: generative A.I. will only drive up the value of human-made work. The market prefers human-made, or at the very least, feels like it should know when something involves A.I., which is a perfectly reasonable request.

Find The Replicant

A friend of mine messaged me this morning and said these latest moves reminded him of the opening scene in Blade Runner. The Voight-Kampff test is one used by the LAPD Blade Runners to help determine if a person is bio-engineered—a “replica”. We’re really doing the same thing with A.I. now.

One of my friend’s points about this, however, is a lot of this is based on fear, and fear often leads to the exact outcome you’re trying to avoid!

Whether these moves are based purely on fear or just on market dynamics, I don’t know. It’s probably a bit of both, because fear can really drive the market.

Calling it What it Is

Since the platforms began to move toward labeling A.I. content, I’ve seen a lot of complaints from people who use the technology. These complaints tend to ask the question: what’s the difference if I use A.I. or not? For example, in writing we use editors and often whole teams to make writing better. What’s the difference if you use A.I. to do it?

Last year, I laid out some of the ethical challenges to using A.I. when an A.I. tool has scraped everyone’s content without permission. The idea that there is no difference between using A.I. or having other humans involved in the creation of something is false. The difference is in the very premise—you are using A.I., not a human. That’s a difference.

The tech industry is notorious for trying to convince us that when tech mimics what human beings do it is ‘the same’ thing as a human being doing it. But it’s not, because it is a technology, not a human being. It helps to call something what it is. Napster was never ‘just like’ giving your friends a mix tape, and social media is not ‘just like’ seeing your friends in real life. That doesn’t mean these things aren’t valuable, only that they’re not the same.

There is a big difference if I tell people the editor on my latest book is President Donald Trump or the editor is my mom. Yes, they are both editors and the job would have been fundamentally the same, but there is still a difference. Whether or not the difference is one of quality is one only the reader can ultimately decide (my mom will do the better job, by the way!) but it’s only fair that people want to know. It informs them on whether or not they want to invest their time, money, effort, or not. A good editor helps my reputation as much as a bad editor may harm it.

Likewise, whether or not you used A.I. informs people. It tells them something. For many, that means they don’t want to read your work. There is no sense in complaining about that. It’s the same as if you make jazz music and complain that Swifties don’t like it. You’re not making music Swifties will like, but you are making music jazz aficionados might like.

What about people with health issues, or disabilities, or financial issues who can’t afford a human being to help them create? Should they be punished for using A.I.? The answer is no, and being open about it does not mean they will. What it means is the reason and intention behind the A.I. use can be made more clear and that reason can often work to your advantage. Because, art often sells not just because of the aesthetics, but the story behind it.

Cyborg Art is About The Story

That’s why Neil Harbisson, the world’s first recognized Cyborg, gets respect for his cyborg art—not because solid palettes on large canvases are necessarily in demand aesthetically, but because he was born with a disability that prevents him from seeing color, and his antenna helps him ‘hear’ sound, which he translates onto canvas. More at this video below, but I’ll probably write a larger article on this (I am writing about him in my upcoming book on culture, art, and pastoring).

Again, Donald Trump will ask me for money to edit my book, but my mom might not (or she might)! I would probably not be punished for having my mom edit the book. In fact, in some cases, I might even be rewarded for it, depending on the final outcome, because many will think it was sweet that my mom edited the book and that’s one thing that will make them connect to it.

In the long run, I suspect that those who need to use A.I. not because they’re trying to get thoughtless content out quicker and game the algorithm, but because of human fragility, may even be rewarded for how effectively they use the tech.

A.I. has not devalued human-created art. It has done the opposite, and it will continue to do so. Art’s value will always be judged on the human element—the human story behind the art. The silver lining with A.I., and I’ve also been saying this from the beginning, is that it’s going to finally bring the content slop algorithm machine introduced by social media to reckon with itself. The age of the online social media slop-fluencer is coming to an end, and A.I. has helped us see through it. Good riddance, I say. The “new media” revolution will come full circle.

For more thoughts on this, check out this essay:

Lyrically, the band shone. Band members Dan Haseltine (vocals), Charlie Lowell (piano, keyboards), Stephen Mason (lead guitar), and Matthew Odmark (rhythm guitar) from the get-go had a particular approach to artistry that they stuck to throughout their career. It’s one that’s so needed in our time.

Yet it is one that is often exceptionally difficult to succeed with commercially.

The ‘90s Scene

The early ‘90s to the very early 2000s were an incredibly stimulating time in the music scene. It was the time of the Last Great Rock Revolution. From about the mid-2000s, things change, and for a host of factors, including the rise of the mp3 and the industry thrown into turmoil.

Each member of Jars of Clay were outspoken Christians. They were just around the age of 20 and 21 on average when they won a prestigious competition, giving them an opportunity to get a record deal. They were one of the few bands at the time that had all the elements young Christian music fans (like me) were looking for: excellent musicians, creatively authentic, and capable of making spiritual, contemplative rock that spoke of both the joys and the difficulties of a life of faith. This is the “in-between” space—not Christian music but open, honest music about faith.

This was turning into an incredibly successful formula. Amy Grant, Stryper, Larry Norman, Keith Green—these were functioning on the fringes of the church and of music culture, and each for different reasons, and yet it was working. The Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) scene was being filled with independent record labels that could take risks and explore different approaches. Jars signed to Essential records, a smaller label that gave them the freedom they were looking for.

Every Christian musician I personally knew wanted to make music in this space. It was quite exciting and liberating for Christian artists, because in the ‘90s, the general artist scene (music, visual arts, and more) was very anti-Christian. You could be just about any religion or believe just about anything except Christianity. In his book, The Faithful Artist, Kevin J. Anderson does an excellent job of tracing why this was the case (and still is, but I think it might be less aggressive today). It stems from the beginning of the modernist movement.

As nineteenth- and twentieth-century secularists jettisoned religion, they embraced aesthetics as their means to establish a cultural foothold. In service to this cause, a struggle for creative emancipation ensued, during which time-honored virtues such as truth, goodness and beauty were subject to considerable scrutiny and then either relativized or discarded. Whether by design or default, this position left twentieth-century artists operating at the forefront (hence the term avant-garde) of cultural chaos. The artists’ aggressive dismissal of absolutes—in every form—anticipated the social and intellectual realities of the postmodern condition that would follow.

It was hard for your art to be taken seriously if it was connected to Christianity, which was seen to be attached to absolutes and representative of an oppressive establishment. A space where you could exist as an artist while still keeping your faith, or at least not having to hide it, was sorely needed. The CCM scene was diversifying and seemed to be moving into operating in that space. Musicians were finding commercial success in that space and were able to make a living—something that very few people expected.

It’s fair to add, though, that the antagonism from the art scene was not one-sided. Christians since the Reformation have been notoriously suspicious of what comes out of the art world, and frequently never understand it. This growing divide has only gotten deeper. This is something every Christian artist has experienced: well-meaning Christians who don’t understand any art unless it is explicitly and obviously Christian, and preachy. It’s generally easier to market something that does that.

The CCM scene in the ‘90s, however, saw a rising tide of artists like Jars of Clay choosing the path of most resistance, which I describe as the Johnny Cash way—a Christian man who wore his heart on his sleeve, and was open about his questions, hurts, and even difficulties with his own faith. A man who many musicians of all stripes consider to be a legend.

The Johnny Cash way appeared to be working. Until it didn’t. The whole idea fell out of favor with everyone quickly. I’ve written about this before, and it’s ended up being my most popular article here:

I don’t want to repeat what I wrote there, but to summarize, the reasons why I think things changed was not only because of the pressure on the music industry as a whole due to rampant piracy, but because contemporary worship music in the Church became a safer bet for the CCM industry—one that both catapulted the industry’s commercial success but has, in the long run, resulted in it becoming very myopic. Keith Green used to rail against CCM’s complacency and lack of purity, but ironically, it may be that as CCM became more purist it also became more shallow, learning how to paint the right veneer over what really happens inside.

Despite Jars’ incredible artistry, they were never quite able to reach the same heights of their first album—1.5 million units on their debut, with their second album “Much Afraid” reaching no. 8 on the Billboard Top 200 (Washington Post). Album after album was nevertheless critically acclaimed. Not one of them sounded exactly the same as the other. The band pushed their creative limits. They remained active for almost twenty years, touring extensively. But it was never secular enough for the larger music market to truly grasp, and it was never safe enough for both the Christian music industry and many Christians to understand, particularly pastors who can hold a lot of influence over their congregation’s listening habits. Simplistic answers to life’s problems can often be frustrating, but a lot of pastors resort to simplistic answers not because they’re unloving, but because they genuinely care. Music addressing the faith in a complex way is not seen as helpful. They want to see their flock happy and not bogged down with complicated things. The Johnny Cash way is exceptionally difficult to market to people who really do want absolutes and for things to always remain positive.

^{Jars of Clay - “Frail” from “Much Afraid. An absolute masterpiece! You have to listen to this one!}

But yet it’s such a necessary art. And it is, in fact, perhaps the true spirit of rock ‘n roll.

Rock’s Church Roots

It may surprise you to know how much rock ‘n roll was influenced by Christianity. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis—these guys were all influenced by early gospel music, in particular, and what they saw in the black Baptist and Pentecostal churches of the American South. The controversy over rock ‘n roll was not because it was some brand new music style that people couldn’t understand (that’s the myth) but because it was a secularization of what was already going on in church. These singers spent their youth in the church, and many church-goers felt cheated when these young guys took the church music of the South and made it into something else.

Music journalist Steve Turner (Rolling Stone, NME) frequently traced this little-known part of history, showing how early singers and performers took the energy and style of black churches, replaced God with girls, and found a winning formula. In his book Hungry for Heaven, Turner provides one clear example:

“Soul pioneers took the church experience with them in the way they ‘worked’ audiences and in the pleading tones of their voices. They preached and exhorted, they called for congregational responses, they orchestrated their shows to take audiences down to the depths of sorrow and up to peaks of ecstasy. Church phrases like ‘have mercy,’ ‘oh Lord', ‘I wanna testify’ and ‘can I get a witness?’ turned up, with new meanings, in songs by James Brown, Johnnie Taylor and Marvin Gaye.”

In his book, Turner continues to trace the Christian themes in the music scene up until the ‘90s (when the book was last revised and published). Sometimes they’re more obvious, such in the case of U2. Other times, it’s more obscure. But throughout, “secular” music (whatever that really is) artists have frequently moved from girls back to heaven—realizing they wanted to write something deeper, and trying to understand their own longings and the meaning of life. It seems to happen as artists get older. Coldplay, Justin Bieber, Twenty-One Pilots are fairly recent examples, and I guess we have to wait for some of our younger artists today to grow up before we see the same themes pop up.

In other words, mixing heavenly longing, the difficulties of understanding who God is, grappling with suffering in our world and longing for justice, are all mainstream themes that have always been explored in music. For a person to sing about God is not something new. We’ve been singing about God for a long time, in and outside of our churches. Why a band like Jars of Clay had to be treated as if they’re something strange has nothing to do with their lyrics or their faith but everything to do with expectations when a band is labelled CCM.

^{“River Constantine” from the album “If I Left the Zoo” - the production on this is wonderful!}

Johnny Cash famously said that he wasn’t a Christian musician but a musician who was a Christian. This distinction can sometimes be splitting hairs, but it mattered a lot to me growing up. I, too, wanted to be a musician writing honest songs about my faith and my struggles with my faith and the strength I get from my faith. It was a distinction that a lot of Christian artists wanted to follow, and many still do today.

But the Christian music marketing machine doesn’t really know what to do with this. The K-Love radio crowd are not signing up for that—it’s not family friendly and positive. And that’s okay. We should all have the freedom to listen to what we want. The irony, however, is a lot of the CCM industry is filled with people who live in the gray zone—or the struggle zone—that the music itself often makes no space for. Even more, there are many in that industry who don’t even believe in Jesus, but are happy to take the paycheck.

^{“Crazy Times” from the album “Much Afraid” - such a great folk alt rocker!}

Take That Path of Most Resistance

The in-between space for Christian artists is still an opportunity waiting to be properly explored. The in-between space does not just have to consist of songs that explore the struggles and disappointments of life and faith, and the questions of what it all means, but also a space that can bring us hope.

Not in a cheap, sentimental way. Not in a preachy way. But in a way that also acknowledges love in the world and that God has come to change it all. Artists are called to inspire our imagination in a way that lets us see beyond the suffering and the darkness and the longing we all experience, and to lift our head to look beyond the horizon.

“The Edge of Water” is one song from Jars that I think begins to touch on this theme. It’s a longing for Jesus to come back and set everything right—to truly bring the justice, peace, and future He promised long ago.

This is honest struggle with a glimpse of hope. It’s the in-between space. Working here is risky and difficult, but yet it’s the space where so much of the world’s best art has come from.

Jars of Clay’s last album, Inland, was released in 2013. wrote a review at the time at Mockingbird:

At the end of the day, Inland represents something of a manifesto for Jars of Clay. It is the siren song for a band that has come from CCM roots to independent labels to self-production while never losing that unique sound and witness in the world. This is a manifesto of love “as the ruins fall,” as C.S. Lewis so aptly put it. Jars of Clay attempts, with this album, to answer the question of what love looks like in this present age and its status in contemporary American society. It is still broken because humanity is still broken, but as with every era, it is never incapable of being redeemed because the promise delivered in the ancient days and fulfilled two thousand years ago still finds a foothold in the embattled and bloodied remains of our relationships and everyday existence. It is the message delivered to our lonely, disconnected islands from the inland, calling us to come back to port.

^{“Fall Asleep” from the album “Inland” - I love the story of this song and think it could probably make a whole movie of its own!}

Safe art provides no vision. We need the vision of the kingdom of heaven to come through in our art. And as listeners, we need to allow artists some space to work out the difficult things. Part of the problem with the CCM industry is it tried to make young people into heroes of the faith—into celebrities. That kind of pressure was never fair on them. Many have “deconstructed” or left the faith altogether because you could see they were put into a pressure cooker and given nothing to help them. Of all the music “industries”, it should be more than that.

When Jars stopped releasing albums, I was very sad about it. But sometimes it’s for the best to leave a legacy as it is. I always hoped they would explore more of the world music sound in this song below from their album Good Monsters, inspired by their African missionary work to provide running water to the many beautiful people of that continent who don’t have it.

^{“Light Gives Heat” from “Good Monsters”.}

I wanted this post to be something of a tribute to the band and its artistry. I’ve not always agreed with what the band members have had to say outside of their music—as much as I’ve not agreed with many of my other favorite artists, either. But in those cases, we can look at the humanity behind it and remember we’re all “good monsters”—broken people failing, but loved by God, who came to die for us, bring peace to our consciences, settle our raging hearts, and give us a wonderful future.

Take a Tour Through Jar’s Discography

This post was inspired by who published a deep dive of Jars’ discography this last weekend.

Christian Music Archeology

Artist Deep Dive: Jars of Clay

Jars of Clay…

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3 months ago · 8 likes · 5 comments · Christian Music Archeology

If you’ve never listened to Jars, I recommend you do! Or if it’s been awhile, I recommend firing them up again! Last week I went through their music again. It had been years since I listened to them. I realized this weekend that I stopped listening to them at about the same time I gave up on my own dreams to exist in the “in-between space” with my own music. I’ve only started publishing songs again this year after a long hiatus—one that I intend to unpack in more detail at some stage here at Just One Beautiful Thing. Listening to them has been a reminder to me to keep picking up the guitar and just singing.

For years I’ve been saying here and elsewhere that the emergence of AI in the creative fields is going to increase the value of human-created art, particularly writing, music, and even the (physical) visual arts.

At the same time, it’s decreasing the value of what we could say was already slop—LinkedIn posts, a great deal of the self-help market (there will be a big differentiator here), books made purely just for marketing a brand, content farms, social media spammers, etc.

Yesterday Substack joined the rising tide of platforms looking to solve the influx of AI content through labeling what is and what isn’t machine made. The music streaming services have been going this way. Bandcamp were the first to outright ban AI content on the platform. Tidal, Qobuz, Apple have been employing different versions of labeling the content. Now the writing platforms are hopping on board.

The platforms are now clearly betting on the human horse.

This is an obvious move for Substack, who wants to differentiate itself in the market as a place to find quality writing and thoughtful takes—or at least look like they’re trying to do that. Here’s their post below if you want to read it all, but I’ll provide a quick summary further below. I’ll then answer some common objections I saw all yesterday and this morning which are worth thinking about.

The Substack Post

Against Claudefishing

It’s getting harder to tell what’s real on the internet…

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3 months ago · 4702 likes · 885 comments · Chris Best

Basically, Substack have integrated the service called Pangram into the platform. Users will be able to run a quick check on anything 100 words or more, and it’ll give the article a rating on how much it seems to be written by AI.

In addition, writers on the platform can make use of a “How I Make This” feature, which really gives an opportunity for transparency and nuance.

Writers can also run a scan before publishing, and dispute if they see their writing being flagged inappropriately. Apparently writers can even turn the tool off, but I haven’t found where this is.

Going forward, users may eventually be able to filter out AI content, if they want.

That’s the summary. But why have they implemented this? Their reason(s):

When content made by no one takes over parts of the internet that are supposed to be human, it pollutes the commons and makes it hard to discover and hear human voices. When readers have to wonder if what they’re reading is real, it undermines trust in authorship and threatens the livelihood of writers—including those who use AI tools thoughtfully to produce work they believe in. Platforms that reward fakeness will create a race to the bottom.

It’s obvious, and I don’t know why it’s taken so long to get here, but most people don’t actually want to primarily engage with content, but with people. That’s what’s being admitted here. Robot-made content does not carry enough meaning for most people.

The Medium is the Message

What makes an artwork (a painting, music, writing) valuable is not just the basic aesthetics but also its meaning. The meaning is not just derived from the art itself but from the way it was made, who made it, and how it is presented. In 1964, the communication theorist, Marshall McLuhan coined the term “the medium is the message”. The content of a message is one thing, but the character of it another. The platform you deliver the message on, and the way you construct it, carries a great sense of meaning as well.

In other words, it’s not just what you say, but also how you say it.

That’s why a lot of punk music, even if technically bad, can still be popular: because it has another layer of meaning. A band like Joy Division played into this contradiction exceptionally well, working hard to make music that sounds lazy, in a sense, and to craft a look that was much the same. Yet it carried multiple layers of meaning.

Writing with AI might produce what looks like perfect writing (hint: there’s no such thing, actually) but that doesn’t matter. Using it sends a message to the reader. For many, that message is something like, “I didn’t bother to spend time on this, because you don’t really matter to me, I only want to pretend you do so I can get something from you.”

You’re basically asking people to invest more time in your writing than you did. Most people feel cheated in that exchange. They don’t think of writing (or music, or paintings) in that way. Using AI sends a message, regardless of how good the prose might even be.

Objectively, jazz is more technically musical than punk music, but that doesn’t make it better, only different. People have their preferences because of what each means to them. You can be technically good at art, but there’s a lot more than just that. There’s the human story behind the art that gives it meaning. I unpacked this in more detail in this post:

In short, what makes your art valuable is you.

People want you, not a robot, when they want to truly engage with your art.

It all comes down to what it is you’re trying to do: create content or art.

There is a difference. In 1996, Bill Gates wrote that “content is king”. That’s been the mantra for the internet. It shaped the way we engage with creativity online and in many ways industrialized creativity, particularly writing, by incorporating scale into the equation. The printed press already started that, but the internet really ramped it up—and it went into full Hulk mode with social media.

The Cheap Game Gets Put in its Drawer

In some ways, AI might undo this by now making the differentiation between content and art much clearer. People feel it’s inauthentic if you call yourself a thought leader and writer but you didn’t put much thought or effort in. It makes you a “poser”, whether you like it or not. If you’re claiming to sell high-end ramen but are actually using two-minute noodles, no one is actually impressed.

If you want to play in the field of cheaper writing (AI) then that’s the field you should be rated against. That’s only fair and allows people to know what they’re really getting when they invest in you. Yes, there are people who use AI and then really work on it. But it’s still not the same thing as not using AI at all. It only makes sense that we know who is doing what, especially on a platform like Substack.

I have friends who use AI to write. I have no problem with it most of the time because they are not writers. They use writing in their business because they need to communicate. Training manuals, emails… a ton of things where quality prose is not really necessary in their line of work. That’s fine as far as I’m concerned, although it also has its limits. A CEO should consider how authentic they are really being if they use AI to write all their communication. But that’s a whole different story.

We’ve come through a long phase with the internet where writers have had to really struggle against thought leaders and big podcasters with massive teams and budgets that help them get content out at scale on social media and other spaces, playing the quantity game where many writers could not. Publishers jumped on board this too, and everything has been about platform size for a very long time now. AI is the end point of that game. And it may even be the undoing of it. Stacks of ‘follows’ means very little when three quarters of it may be bots. People are also getting tired of it all, and for good reason, and therein lies an opportunity for writers with an authentic voice to be valued for their craft, their voice, and their story, again.

Perhaps this is giving us all the opportunity to get off the treadmill.

I started experimenting with AI quite early on—I think it was around 2022 or 2023. I knew it would only get better, as all tech does, but I also had a feeling that people would reject the Matrix sooner or later. There are aspects of human nature that are timeless, and it doesn’t matter how great your tech is, human nature will not change. The future remains human.

Common Objections

I’ve seen some common objections to categorizing AI content that are popping up again in light of Substack’s announcement. Other platforms will follow. I’ve given this a lot of thought for a long time so here are some answers that I think add to the conversation. (This isn’t a defense of Substack in particular, but more a defense of the general approach of labeling AI content.)

1. Isn’t it ironic that we’re using AI to detect AI?

Yes, I guess it takes one to know one!

2. What about false positives?

This came up a lot during Bandcamp’s announcement too.

I think Substack’s “How I Make This” feature is interesting, as it allows for a creator to be open about their AI use and address the nuances.

What this could create is a culture of transparency—which is what we need—where those who might be trying to take advantage of the preference for human created writing will eventually be exposed as frauds.

If your content consistently shows up on the AI meter but you claim you don’t use it, then there will be questions.

If you’re trying to hide how you use the tool, then you should ask yourself some questions.

In my opinion as an editor—if your writing consistently shows up on AI detectors as AI written and you don’t use AI to write, then use it as a tool to address your style. Chances are your writing may be boring! (Harsh? Yes, editors can be harsh. I’m grateful for editors in helping shape my writing!)

3. I know the AI has been trained on my content, and now my writing will be flagged when it’s not AI. That’s not fair!

The AI is designed to venture toward averages. That’s partly why it can be boring, even if you try and direct it toward a certain style. This means I actually don’t think people need to worry. I know the AI has ingested my writing too, and I am honestly not concerned I’ll get flagged.

4. Isn’t AI just a neutral tool? We don’t ask other people what tools they used—the end product is all that matters.

While it’s true that every tool can be used for good and bad things, it’s also true that no tool is strictly neutral—it was designed with a specific purpose in mind. The AI industry has made it clear what they think the purpose of AI is, and they are developing it in accordance with their vision. They have told us themselves that they see an opportunity to monopolize markets; create dependency; cheapen production, to name a few. We get to decide if we want to be on board with all that.

Not to mention that they have essentially hoovered up everyone else’s content for free and then are trying to sell it all back to us, repackaged. The medium is the message, and by using AI extensively in your own production, you inadvertently put yourself into this ethics conversation and signal something to the user about what you think of it. Each should follow their own conscience, of course, but the point is to be aware of what it is you might be saying even if you’re not saying it.

What about open source / open weight models? These are developed and given away for free, running locally on computers. The ethics around this I think is a little easier to work through. However, it’s nuanced.

At the end of the day, you have to decide to pick your own battles. The point is to just know what to expect going in.

5. It’s dehumanizing to be put into a box

Sure, but yet I can bet you’re happy to niche your own art and try and market to a particular type of person. This is about market differentiation, not putting people in a box.

I know that art is intensely personal and it’s only natural to feel personally affronted. I have felt personally affronted by AI itself. However, I think the best way forward is simply to lean into the idea of niche. If you make AI-assisted art, that’s part of your niche now. It’s no use complaining that people who don’t like it don’t like it. As you grow in your art, you realize you can’t please everyone, and nor should you want to. If you were pleasing everyone, you’d please no one, because your message would pretty much be shallow and boring.

Incidentally, this is what makes AI writing pretty boring—it’s designed to try and please everyone, and so it says pretty much nothing of substance when you really scrutinize it. This is also because AI produces signifiers without any experience of what is being signified, but that’s for another whole discussion.

These are the top objections I keep seeing pop up. I think it’s good news and the way culture is shaping up around this is, in my opinion, going in a good direction.

This one is as low production values as you can get, and it was completely ad-libbed. Inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska album, which was a low-budget home recording affair in 1982, I’ve been thinking of just turning on the recorder and letting fly.

So that’s what I did with this one. The pickup in my Taylor acoustic guitar recently broke, so I have to record it using a microphone. But I only have one microphone. So I positioned it so I could more-or-less record both my voice and the guitar at the same time. Then I just started playing and singing whatever came off the top of my head. My thoughts initially went to Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, and I think that’s kind of the vibe in the end. I just went with it, and this is the result.

These are the lyrics which came to my mind and I just sang them out:

So you think you can see, just the way it should be,

So you think you can see, just the way it should be.

You think you know. You think you’ve got it all worked out.

Before you can even sing.

You find that you don’t really know. You don’t really know.

You don’t know what you think you do. It’s far more, far more, than you ever dreamed.

Than you ever dreamed.

It’s very much reflective of how I feel at 47. It shifts between feeling powerless about life—we think we’ve got it all worked out, and then we don’t—to seeing the wonder of it all.

Life has so much beauty and mystery about it, and it’s so vast and complex. Just think of how every decision you make affects others and can even reverberate long after you’re gone. God has really given us so much freedom that is both daunting and exciting. It’s all so complex and huge that it’s far more than we can even dream. To see the beauty in all this requires a shift in perspective—one I’m learning to make.

I recorded this in my garage, so none of this is at all how it should be done. After the recording I found the microphone was doing some odd clipping, even though I checked the volume beforehand. I think it has something to do with the latency on my DAW. But I liked the song and the complete ad-lib nature of it, and I thought the clipping can even add some character—reminding me of listening to my dad’s Pink Floyd records on vinyl when I was a kid. So I loaded in some plugins to add more warmth and dirt, threw on some reverb and a tiny bit of delay, and this is the song. Just push play above.

If you’d like to support my music in some way, you can get it at Bandcamp or stream it on Spotify or the usual streaming services. Or just make sure you’re subscribed here!

A series of management blunders, however, meant that Amiga’s technical and cultural dominance didn’t last all that long, but the brand has always carried tremendous value, especially with creative geeks.

Last year (2025), the Commodore brand officially relaunched, initially appealing to the retro market with its computers but yet holding promise for something forward looking.

This year, the company has surprised everyone by announcing a new, unique phone. And it’s done so at just the right time with just the right kind of product.

Peak Computing And Techno Optimism

I’ve been writing for quite a while now on the anti-tech cultural shift taking place. The current anti-A.I. sentiment that has now hit mainstream continues to grow, and is not so much because of A.I. itself or large language models (LLMs) (an impressive technology, all things considered) but because of how the tech industry is rolling it all out, who is running the show, and the motives behind why they’re doing what they’re doing. If we hadn’t already been fed up with social media and our lives whittling away at screens, privacy issues, the way tech bosses talk, and how they cozy up to governments, we might have cut the tech companies some slack when they released A.I. But when they went around telling us we’re all going to become expendable and started building massive data centers that resemble a future from all our favorite dystopian sci-fi stories, to assist in having us all lose our jobs, the camel’s back has begun to break.

Not to mention when they ate up all of our hard work and content on the internet without permission and are now trying to sell it all back to us, repackaged.

Commodore’s response has been to appeal to the peak techno-optimism of the late 90s and early 2000s (“Y2K”) while also being forward looking. It’s done this by releasing the “Callback 8020” (pictured above and below in two of the five available colors), a flip-phone with all the feels and colors of 80s, 90s and 2000s tech but including all of today’s tech and apps that are actually useful to our lives and deliberately excluding the tech that sucks up our lives.

So you can listen to music, stream music, take photos, use Whatsapp and messenger, GPS, etc. You can see a full list of apps here and how it works (it’s quite flexible). It installs Android apps. But what you can’t do is install social media apps, and it won’t let you use a browser.

There are a lot of phones like this on the market, but not quite like this. The dumb phones / feature phones such as the Nokias that play in a similar space tend to always miss an important component, usually Whatsapp or a decent GPS, or ridesharing services, or something that is practical. They’re also not as flexible in what you can and cannot do. I know this because I’ve always been looking. This one seems to hit the right spot.

Commodore are uniquely positioned as a brand that represents simpler, calmer, and more useful technology, with what is now a unique aesthetic that doesn’t look like the boring iPhone or Samsung Galaxy offerings. Who really wants another phone with just a screen and rounded corners? This is important aesthetically as a new generation is enamored with analogue and design trends seem to be moving beyond the minimalist styles that has dominated from the mid 2000s until now.

For example, Ferrari’s “Luce” EV, pictured below, received nothing but disdain.

Designed by Jonny Ive of Apple fame, this probably would have been peak beauty in many eyes in 2010 and probably labelled forward looking. But the public are now evidently sick of this sort of thing.

“Ugly I could handle, because at least an ugly car has some character. No, the problem with the Luce is that it's boring. And that to me is the biggest sin of all. Ferrari can be a lot of things, but it should never be boring,” said Keith Buglewicz at Edmunds.

I’m not a big car guy, but I know that if I had the cash to buy a sports car, it wouldn’t be this. Compare this with the classic Lamborghini Countach, which is interesting.

I don’t think this is about nostalgia. I think we’re at an interesting cultural moment. As books such as The Fourth Turning reveal, culture’s shift when a new generation rebels against the previous generation’s norms. It’s inevitable that what has dominated culture for the last 20 years is going to start looking a little stale, and I think we’re entering into that now.

Good on Commodore for recognizing that. I hope they succeed, because tech that promises to make life easier and get out of the way was the dream from the beginning. That’s what Steve Jobs sold us. It’s still a good dream, and we can have it, if we’d just vote with our feet!

See more about the phone here.

Punk rock has a rich history of upsetting all the right people. Emerging in the 1970s, officially, but I’d say going even back to 60s garage bands, the whole idea has been to give the middle finger to the establishment in both style and substance. It’s always been the music of, and for, the rebels.

Practically every decade sees some kind of resurgence, whether it’s the grunge movement (Nirvana, Sonic Youth) or skater punk of the 90s; or the “post-punk” and alternative scenes (more artistic and subtle) that tend to emerge afterward (Joy Division in the 70s, R.E.M. in the late 80s); or the “post-punk revival” of the 2000s (which admittedly was pretty lackluster), the idea is the same: lo-fi, authentic aesthetics; anti-establishment sentiment that speaks to the youth (except those 2000s bands seemed to be a little lost. There wasn’t much interesting protest music in the 2000s and 2010s, which may be why we are where we are today?).

Of course, many bands and artists that start off punk have ended up very successful, if important band members have survived, and in some cases become the very establishment they railed against in their youth. It’s the irony of life. But when some of those guys tap into their anti-establishment ethos, even at an old age, that’s when they tend to produce their best music. U2 always considered themselves punk, but their introspective albums tend to be boring and naval-gazing, while their protest albums tend to be the best—even the latest one.

For some time, I and many others have been writing about how the tech industry has become the new establishment—one as scary and as powerful than ever—and how the kids will eventually rise up against it. That time is now coming thick and fast. The protest has been happening silently, with Gen Z interested in all things analogue and making their sentiments known subtly. Now it’s getting louder.

First, what you might have seen already. It’s been a bad week or two for A.I.’s public image. Three college speeches that were pro A.I. were booed loudly and proudly, and these have been making the rounds online with plenty of commentary applauding the boos, and A.I. defenders not happy at all about what many have been telling them is coming.

NBC has done a great job of putting the highlights together in this clip:

Second, if you’re into looking at some stats, has put together a fantastic article that puts together surveys, polls and research on public sentiment of A.I. in the U.S., and the culture is really moving towards massive negativity. See that here:

The Algorithmic Bridge

How America Turned Against AI According to the Poll Data: A (Very Big) Compilation

Hey there, I’m Alberto! 👋 Each week, I publish long-form AI analysis covering culture, philosophy, and business for The Algorithmic Bridge. Paid subscribers also get Monday how-to guides and Friday news commentary. I publish occasional extra articles. If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, here’s a button for that…

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5 months ago · 56 likes · 11 comments · Alberto Romero

Third, and what I found the most encouraging, is this little snippet, which I originally saw posted by Brian Roemmele on X/Twitter (Brian has very interesting views on A.I.). It’s a song by a punk group called Knights of Molino—a bunch of American middle-schoolers. It’s pretty tight punk rock for middle-schoolers—and while obviously amateur, that’s the whole point of punk, isn’t it?

Of course, one middle-school band railing against A.I. might not be a movement as much as a moment. Critics to this have been saying these are just a bunch of privileged kids brainwashed by their parents. I don’t think it matters where they come from (and it’s wrong to make big assumptions)—the point is the youth are not happy at all with tech. (And I think these kids are having a good time and are working hard, too. Check them out on YouTube.)

It’s indicative of a sentiment that’s been brewing in the underground, will bubble over, and is already starting to even become a political movement. It’s showing all the signs of going that direction, and this year it’s starting to galvanize.

It doesn’t matter that lots of people use A.I. (whether from manufactured demand by the tech industry shoehorning it into everything; or companies insisting on its use when not even knowing if it’ll work; or genuine demand, who knows?). It doesn’t matter whether the tech is even useful. The kids are not happy, and they’re saying something about it. I think that makes them alright. It’s good when the establishment is challenged. It’s about time we see the young generation saying something.

To think Silicon Valley’s grip on culture for the last twenty or so years will last forever is to not know history very well. There’s no reason to believe every tech innovation is a good one for society; and no reason to believe that just because it’s tech, society will love it and adopt it forever. At some stage, something new will arise. I’m still hopeful that what will come through all of this is something more human.

I would often sit in front of my dad’s hi-fi just listening. David Gilmour from Pink Floyd’s guitar was especially inspiring, as well as Richard Wright’s extensive synth work. I was actually fascinated by both of these instruments. My dad was always after high-fidelity, clear sound. He had an extensive vinyl collection (still does) and tons of cassettes. I remember he would tape his vinyl onto special, expensive cassettes, which promised to be of high-quality. He wanted the best sound quality he could get, even in his car.

The quest for the ultimate sonic landscape somehow gripped me, and I was very much interested in the whole experience. For me, songs were not just things to sing along with, but world’s you could get lost in. I think from an early age I saw songs and albums as pieces of art, not as bubblegum pop. Music wasn’t just about dancing or having a good time (although my dad was a DJ when he was younger) but it was a complete sonic journey.

Later on, I realized how music brings comfort and hope, which is what I want to achieve with my art.

I began writing music from about twelve years old, about a year after I became a Christian. These two events are actually linked in my mind, as I think there was some spiritual calling in it. I started in what I think is a rather unusual space, which was using tracker software on a DOS computer.

Only geeks from that time would remember trackers, and I will one day write a whole article about them, because they were instrumental in making music on computers and don’t actually get the credit they deserve. (Did you catch my pun?) Trackers were first invented for the Commodore Amiga and then various versions were ported to PC. I started on “Noisetracker”, a port of the original Amiga Soundtracker. A Tracker was (and is) a different approach to making music. It has a unique ‘top-down’ interface where you punch in notes like a spreadsheet, or like a paper roll used by a self-playing piano. It was entirely sample-based, and you originally only had four tracks to make music on. You had to learn to have channels share ‘instruments’ (samples). Here’s the kind of thing you could make in those early days:

This made me get into techno / EDM, which was the kind of thing you can make on it. (I was a big 2Unlimited fan when they came out, which my friends obviously ripped me off about later.) As computers got more sophisticated, trackers like FastTracker 2 and ScreamTracker 3 would allow for more tracks and bigger samples. I was eventually sampling off the radio and sampling my own singing and rapping, which I would record onto a mix tape and pass around to my friends. I did not get any fans. I sent my demo tapes off to record companies. I did not break through and wasn’t a wunderkid, much to my disappointment.

But I was learning how to make music.

At about 17 I wanted to start playing rock music and my parents bought me my first guitar for Christmas. I was so excited! And now I began to do songwriting in a whole different way. Trackers were a bit limiting for what I needed now, but I couldn’t afford a proper digital audio workstation (DAW) like Cakewalk—all very expensive in those days, and you needed special soundcards etc. It was about this time, however, I met my good friends Kirsten Pearse (who played the drums) and John Stone (who played the bass). We formed a band that didn’t last long, with my short supply of three songs that were not very good. Soon, both John and Kirsten went to play for other bands, but I continued to write music.

Eventually I played in a band called Jonno’s Cure with Kirsten and my (now) brother-in-law. We got a top twenty hit in South Africa and that was fantastic! We only did one or two of my songs, but I was learning. But, as bands go, it did not last. I joined my other friend, John Stone’s band, along with another friend of mine, Jason Townsend on drums. We called ourselves Gutterflower, inspired by a Goo-Goo dolls album, and played together for a few years and did a lot of gigs. John and I shared songwriting responsibilities. But this, too, did not last forever.

The break-up

Bands are strange things. I love them, but they can be hard to manage. It requires a great deal of investment. Now in my mid to late twenties, it was difficult following the dream of ‘one day’ becoming a rock star. I had followed it for years and only enjoyed mild success. I eventually came to the conclusion that I was never going to get married and have a life if I was always married to a band, so I reluctantly quit. I took up writing books instead, and also moved into church ministry, and settled for playing music in church.

This sounds like a mature decision but, in fact, there was something else going on. I actually gave up believing I was any good. And I gave up believing I was going to go anywhere with rock music in South Africa, where that kind of music is not what most of the culture likes (and now, being the mid to late 2000s, rock music was losing in popularity anyway). People did not take to my songs like they did to many of my other friends’ songs, including my brother-in-law, who writes fantastic songs and was writing wonderful worship songs. We had plenty of friends in bands that were enjoying tremendous (relative) success, and I felt I was just not good enough and did not possess the talent I really wanted to have. I was not in demand, and so I quit.

The even other thing going on

I was also convinced of something else, as a Christian. I was convinced that the best way to use my talents was to write church music. This coincides with something that happened with Christian music in the 2000s, which I wrote about in my article “The Day the Christian Music Died”. We all became convinced that “worship music” was the best way to make music as Christians—the best way to “honor the Lord” and the local church. So I tried for years and years and years to write worship music for church. But I just could never do it properly. The “rules” were just too frustrating. The song must be congregational; it must be theologically clear; it must be easy to sing and relatively easy to play. And it usually has to conform to what has become the established “worship music” sound, made popular by the likes of Hillsong—a sort-of poppish, rockish Coldplay sound done a thousand times over. And also, on top of all this, it must be authentic and from the heart. I could not put all this together because my authenticity looks different.

It’s a mistake to tell Christians that their art has to look one way, or that certain forms of art are more worshipful than another. Worship music has its place, but I think there are many, many Christians who want to make an impact in the world with their art, and their art is not valued as it should be. Part of what I’m trying to do with my Just One Beautiful Thing Substack—and a book I’m writing—is challenge the assumptions Christians have about art and what is of value.

I didn’t fit into the worship mold, and it took me too long to just accept that. I wish someone out there would have just encouraged me to be more myself, but church culture can be very strong on this. I eventually got stuck in a rut. I did not improve as a guitarist, although leading worship at church in various contexts meant I did improve as a singer and leader. But I stopped finding it fun, to be honest, and saw it all as a bit of a job. I lost my passion for it and my interest in music itself began to wane. I could see it happening, it made me very sad, but I was just so jaded that I couldn’t get out of it, and no one really seemed to notice. I interpreted this as my skill and talents and passions were just not up to scratch and not valued, and so I fell further into my funk.

Breaking out the Funk

I don’t really know or why what happened next happened, but around 2021 during the end of Covid, I got myself an audio interface for my birthday and was on the hunt for a DAW to record music with. I was just in the mood to experiment. I wondered if I could get the old tracker software I used to use, wondering if I could maybe make something more of it now that computers were so powerful. I found out, to my tremendous delight, that trackers were still around and had evolved, and I discovered Renoise—a modern Tracker / DAW!

I downloaded it and it was like coming home! In an instant I knew the workflow, after spending so many years as a teen in this kind of software.

And I immediately began writing again. Not worship songs; not mid-2000s rock songs that I tried to write back in the day; but just a mix of everything that I’ve ever done. I just started laying something down, experimenting with effects and production and plugins and whatever lyrics that ‘came out’, and I found it tremendously stimulating and interesting. My love for music had returned. I now didn’t care if anyone liked it; didn’t care if it was “worship music”; and didn’t care if it was radio-friendly, would get the respect of my peers, or even if it was any good. I just wanted to put ideas down.

I came back to songwriting. I came back to making music again.

Stairs of Knives

The first song I actually made in this comeback phase has been sitting in my vault for a few years. I use the word ‘made’ there because this song was developed layer upon layer. It started with a Genesis-inspired Linn drum machine idea put through some gated reverb and some other effects. Then I just recorded the first guitar notes that my hands produced as soon as I picked up the guitar. I didn’t care, I was just going to make something. I started experimenting with other drum sounds, guitar effects, and light synth work. The words for the song and the melody I’ve ended up sticking with are the first that just sort-of ‘came out’. They do carry a meaning that I was feeling at the time. I just recorded them and that’s what I stuck to using. Each step was just whatever I was hearing in my mind, and the end result is a culmination, I think, of my musical process since I was a teen—a sort-of Genesis, Pink Floyd, New Wavish inspired song, made and produced using tracker software, this time with proper synths and guitar. It feels like a ‘full circle’ to me, and so a great song to release and launch on.

Since then, I have been writing, with over 200 ideas sitting around (which keeps growing), and twelve of these I’m trying to get recorded for an album, thanks to the help from my friends Kirsten and John—my original band mates. These will be released later. But I wanted to release this first song that I made that brought me back: originally called “Get Away” but now called “Stairs of Knives”, as I thought that lyric was the most interesting one. The song does not have a chorus but just a short series of verses. Here are the lyrics:

I don’t know where I’d go
Without you
I don’t know where I’d be
Without you

I’d climb stairs of knives
I’d run through the night
Get away from me

I hope you enjoy the song! And if you’re a songwriter or an artist who has given up on your art, I hope my story will inspire you to get back to it. Just enjoy the process. Who cares what anyone else thinks? Share it anyway. Because art is made to be shared. Because art is human, and these are our human stories.

If you like it, get it on Bandcamp (below)! I’ll be soon getting my songs onto streaming services too, I’m just waiting on having a few more finished.

I don't want to go to Twitter / X and "catch up" on the world.

I don't want to look at Reddit.

I don't even want to visit Substack.

I don't want to do *anything* online.

It feels like I'm waking up. As if a fog is breaking. A glimpse of reality is shining through. I think to myself: “Is it true? There’s nothing I actually want to look at on the internet?”

When was the last time I found the internet boring? When was the last time there was nothing more I wanted to do on it?

When I was about 19 and didn’t have internet at home (or on the phone! Or even a phone!), my older brother would occasionally invite me to his office on weekends where I could sit on one of the computers there and “surf the web”. I would usually go look at bands and catch up on any new music news. I was often super excited to do this. But then, once I had caught up on music news, I would have to wait for him to finish his work, because there was nothing more I wanted to do on the internet. There was simply nothing else I was interested in.

Things rapidly changed. Once I discovered forums, I was very much hooked. Forums became social media. I remember thinking Facebook was literally a glorified forum. Since then, I can’t really remember another time when I didn’t have at least something to do or to look at on the internet.

But sitting at my screen that Saturday night, a kind of freedom was washing over me as something inside was done with social media. After a weekend of algorithms trying to hook me in hour upon hour, serving up the most inane, insane opinions with hate for the Left, hate for the Right (how many of those calling for hate are bots?), A.I., short videos… and again and again we hear of people radicalized online.

Why are we doing this?

Someone give me one good reason why I should continue to be on social media. To promote my writing? The algorithm doesn’t like me, I don’t pick a political side nor am interested in much politics. The House always wins, and it’s increasingly useless spinning that wheel.

You’ve no doubt seen similar sentiments rising up, getting louder and louder. They’ve filled me with hope. What on earth have we been doing for the last 20 years as social media took over our lives? I went and looked at my Twitter / X account on Sunday, and I joined the platform in 2009. For 16 years I have scrolled and scrolled on that platform. It was initially so exciting: people I admired would post interesting blogs and articles they found online. I remember getting super excited to see what Paul Hewson AKA Bono from U2 was going to post. I think he saw the writing on the wall early and closed his account. But here I was always ahead of the news. I could track trends and be a knowledgeable dude. But like a frog in a boiler, it slowly became something else. Something that has, realistically, added very little real value to my life.

I’ve got almost 900 followers on my Twitter / X over those 16 years, all organic followers, trying my best to build a "platform" online for my writing. It’s really meant nothing. I tried to often engage reasonably with people. I tried to learn. But that kind of thing gets you nowhere on the internet now. Unless you have significant media investment, you sure don’t build a “platform” that way—and even then you better ramp up the rhetoric.

I think now of all the time I’ve spent on Twitter and how it probably drained my energy and motivation more than gave me any. I think of all the books I could have probably gotten completed in that time. All the songs I could have written and finished recording. All the poems I might have read. All the skills I probably could have acquired. Heck, even all the good movies I could have watched—a far better use of “screen time”. All the productive things I could have done in the last 16 years instead of scrolling for probably more hours than I realized.

I want to listen to music, read magazines and books, watch a good movie, stir my imagination with beautiful art, cook with my wife, engage in discussion with people I love. I also want to go to in-person debates, be challenged in my thinking, learn and discuss ideas. This is the kind of culture I want. They promised us we could get this all online. That the world and all of culture was at our fingertips.

But all they did was lure us into an illusion with a sweet sounding song, like the Green Witch in C.S. Lewis’, The Silver Chair.

The Green Witch’s Song

In Lewis’ telling, The Green Witch tries to put the heroes of the story under a spell by lulling them to sleep with an enchanting song coupled with sweet smells and a caring personality, so they will forget their true purpose. This is the tech world and its algorithms. What have we done, letting social media guide our culture for twenty years? So many of us have made "being online" the purpose of our lives—and the worst part is we didn't even realize it.

What has it given us? Far, far less than it ever promised.

Social media is ruining our culture. It was a great idea, I think, but the tech bros destroyed it with their manipulative algorithms, designed to coax us deeper and deeper into their cyberworld of wondrous wickedness.

How did the children break The Green Witch's spell in The Silver Chair? She lulls them with song, with sweet scents, with arguments, convinces them there was no such world as “Narnia” and they all just dreamt it up. Puddleglum, a “Marsh-Wiggle”, puts his foot in a fire. The pain wakes him up. Suddenly clarity hits him again. The sweet smells fade, replaced with the smell of his burnt foot.

“There is nothing like a good shock of pain for dissolving certain kinds of magic,” says the narrative. And the witch is revealed to them all for who she really is.

If we want a better culture, the best thing we could all do is start rejecting the algorithms. Use better platforms, if they exist (Substack’s Notes seems more of the same lately.) Get back to reading print, perhaps. Make our most heated debates in-person moments again, where we can look each other in the eye as human beings with inherent value; not devalue each as mere pixels on a screen.

I still firmly believe we can create a better future. But we need to wake up from our sleep. Maybe I’m being idealistic, as I often am, but I do think we can do better than this. And I think many, many people are realizing this. I continue to read headlines about how Gen Z is deleting social media. I want to join them. Maybe we should put our foot in the fire and just stop scrolling, regardless of the voices that tell us we “need” to be online to keep up.

Culture changes. Is there any reason to believe that Silicon Valley should continue to lead culture? Like the glam metal scene in the 80s, the excesses are now too pronounced, too obvious, and even too taxing. Perhaps the Revenge of the Nerds must finally come to an end.

That feeling of sitting on the pouf and not wanting to look at anything on the internet? I want that more in my life.

Thank you for reading my rant today :).

Bruce Springsteen is one of my favorite artists. But he isn’t quiet about his politics, which are clearly left-leaning. I have a lot of friends who do not like him because of it, and other friends who do like him because of it. For me, I find a deeper message to many of his songs about humanity. So I look at his music from a different angle as just another human being trying to “figure it out”.

That’s one aspect of art that I think is important—and it’s one way I approach art and am able to separate a person’s politics from their art.

I think Springsteen’s commitment to the human project is what drives his politics, and I can respect that. Others have the same commitment and come to a different political opinion. This is what politics is about and we should all be grown up about it. Everyone wants human flourishing, we disagree on how to get there, and there are a pack of freeloaders who see self-serving opportunities in our commitments to that project to enrich themselves. They are the corrupt politicians, and there’s no shortage of them.

Following his own conscience, Springsteen hastily released a protest song last week around the protests in Minnesota and the clash with law authorities and the violence that has ensued. I found it interesting because this one isn’t couched as cleverly as something like “Born in the USA” is but is rather straightforward about who he thinks the bad guys are.

Many people on the American Right will disagree with Springsteen about what really has gone down in Minnesota, and I wonder where their protests songs are. Three years ago, Kid Rock released an openly anti-Biden / Left song (lots of NSFW language—you’ve been warned!)

Perhaps a little more classy than Kid Rock, Oliver Anthony’s surprising hit song (also some NSFW language) from two years ago, “Rich Men North of Richmond” takes a shot at the entire system. Perhaps this is one that everyone could nod in agreement with—and perhaps, therefore, a better protest song?

In this article I’ll venture a little bit into politics, which is not my usual thing to do. I want to look at politics from an artistic perspective, particularly when thinking of the Christian imagination and what the Christian is called to do through art.

How our background informs our politics

I can respect all of these guys’ above point of view. They’re also prove what I’ve learned about politics in my 40+ years of being on this planet: so much of it is framed by experience and background—where you’ve lived and where you are living right now. Oliver Anthony lives in Farmville, Virginia—a small town of about 7,000 people. Springsteen comes from New Jersey and its big city of Philadelphia, a multicultural pot full of rich history tied directly to the American experiment and the blue collar worker. Kid Rock is from Michigan, which is rather interesting since it’s a “Blue State” but I bet there’s a story to his politics.

I’ve been living in America for four years and have been learning a lot about this amazing country—its history, its people, and what it is really all about. I still have a lot to learn. I came to this country believing that God called us here for ministry, and I still believe that. I don’t know what that means in the long term, or, as an immigrant, what’s going to happen next, or even what that means to you reading this. I can say that I came here to add value to this nation in any way I can. Even more, I can also say that one thing that has always impressed me about this country is the great American experiment: the idea that it doesn’t matter where you’re from, your background, or the color of your skin—if you want to add value, if you want to subscribe to American values and help build a nation around them—then you can also become a citizen with full rights and responsibilities, and play your part. I consider my staying here a privilege, not a right, but a privilege I am grateful for nonetheless, with the deep hope of having the privilege of rights and responsibilities as a citizen at some stage, too.

The idea of a country that will see you as an equal if you subscribe to the values, not if you have the right blood, is an idea I think is worth standing up for. That’s what I always saw America as, and it’s one that the Left and Right largely accepted up until recently. Here’s what Reagan (conservative) said:

And of course, Martin Luther King’s (liberal) famous speech about judging a man by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin:

America has always been a politically active country. People really care about what they believe, and I love that about it. But maybe what is actually worth standing up for needs to be made clear again. There’s a theme that runs in this country that has truly made it great. It’s a theme about a commitment to certain values of freedom and the inherent worth of each individual.

A Paranoid Nation

But what I’ve also learned about America in the last four years, and in the years I came to visit beforehand, is that it is a land filled with paranoia. There is always someone out to “get us”. Suspicions run high—you’re often told to be careful because you never know when someone might end up being a hidden enemy. I have wondered if the Cold War did a real number on this amazing nation, causing everyone to be cautious about what everyone else’s real motivations are and suspicious about them. This plays across the entire political scene and explains a lot about why certain politicians make the decisions they do and why this country often votes the way it does.

Politics is Experience

I’m coming to the art part in a moment, I promise, but I’m just laying some foundation work.

I believe in judging people as individuals, not on the basis of group or skin or even ideology, because people come to believe what they believe because of their own unique experience of being human. Nowhere better is this illustrated for me than peoples’ opinions on guns in America.

A gun is a neutral tool designed for a very specific purpose. I’ve noticed that people have many different opinions about guns that relate very much to their experience of them. If you grew up on a farm where the gun was a tool for hunting, providing, and protecting, you may tend toward a positive view of them. Guns are not a threat in this circumstance but are a security. You believe you have a God-given right to protect your family and the gun is one tool that affords you the ability to do so.

But if you grew up in a ghetto and were exposed to a lot of gun violence, you see a very different thing when you see a gun. It is for you probably a sign and signal of families torn apart, trauma and crime and sadness, and people lost too soon. You also believe you have a God-given right to protect your family and therefore having less guns in society affords you the ability to do so.

Your view on guns is often not framed by the big picture but by your own experience of them. If you had a fairly neutral experience with guns you will have a neutral view of them. That doesn’t mean your neutral opinion is the more mature one, it just means you are just as biased as everyone else by your experience.

The whole point of the American experiment was to try and create a society where each can live according to their own conscience. The laws on guns try to reflect this, but it is a difficult one. There are limits to freedom of conscience when we are trying to live together. This is why a free society will always be a society in flux. It’s part of the package.

Immigration and Art

Commenting on the Minnesota and immigration issue is hard for me right now because I, myself, am an immigrant. My opinion may be biased. Of course, I think violence is completely unacceptable, but when I’ve looked at the videos and heard the stories from Minnesota and the unfolding tragedies, I try and consider it all from a human point of view.

People are under a lot of pressure. Law enforcement, some probably under-trained, feel in danger all day, and are out there in sub-zero temperatures. The people protesting feel in danger, and many of them are protesting because they have friends who feel in danger. Immigrants feel in danger. Violence breaks out in this kind of tension because our fight-or-flight response gets the better of us. That doesn’t excuse it, but it helps to explain a lot.

And in the mix of all this, there are those who see it all as an opportunity to build their own brand, use the events as content for their social media, exert their own influence, and use hurting human beings for their own enrichment. This is the system that lurks in the background, adding to the pressure.

In fact, we all feel the pressure from invisible powers all day—hidden forces that we can’t quite explain that seem to bear down on us. This is the system everyone is paranoid about. It makes us suspicious about who our enemies really are, and whether our neighbor may, in fact, be a raging lunatic on the internet. Everyone feels scared about the same thing, but for some reason we allow ourselves to look the wrong direction for our enemy. This is why the Bible is explicit: our war is not actually against flesh and blood, but against spiritual powers and authorities (Ephesians 6:12). We don’t always know what these are or how they work—whether a metaphor that describes the hidden oppressive systems of society or describes literal beings who play games with us. Or perhaps even both. But it’s a reality of living. Almost everyone feels like they have no power in this world and that something else is really calling the shots, and the slightest mistake will cause you to have even less power over your own life.

Art is meant to help expose all this. To help us see the real enemy.

Fantasy and sci-fi, as one example of an approach, is not just about monsters and beings and strange planets, but about exposing the heart of humanity and the hidden forces at work—giving us a picture of what is really going on.

For example, art can help shine a light on the paranoia—the spiritual undercurrent—affecting everyone and ask: what’s that about? If we could deal with that, might we not be able to deal with all this (all this other stuff) better?

Immigration affects me directly. I sacrificed a lot coming to the USA, but if I have to go back to South Africa (as many friends are now having to do) I will end up sacrificing even more, because by then I’ll honestly have nothing left. I have no job to go back to, investments, homes, nothing. I will have my extended family, whom I of course miss, but I will have zero security for a future for me and my family. I will have to try and start a third life in my mid-forties, which is not easy to do. We did not come here with much and we do not have a backup plan. I will still freelance as a ghostwriter, but moving clients over will be hard due to tax reasons and that will cost me even more. So, for me, I feel the invisible forces at work in my life every day, waiting for any moment when I might be made powerless.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, because it’s a very human situation. Just listen to those songs above. These are human beings not just giving you their opinion but telling you something of their experience of living in this world. They are exposing their fears, their anger, their point of view; and with that we can see we live in a broken world in need of healing.

This is art. It shows us that we’re broken. It shows us that there is a hidden world we’re not considering. It can help us deal with the realities of our sin, our anger, our paranoia, our need for hope.

Or, at least that’s what art should be. It’s what it is when it’s not commodified, packaged, commercialized, branded, and put on a social media feed. And it can definitely be used for the opposite: to amplify our paranoia, which a lot of it does. Art can very easily turn into propaganda.

It gets rather confusing, doesn’t it? Is Bruce Springsteen just satisfying his fanbase through his song? Is Kid Rock just looking for his niche? Are they secretly working for some sort of political organization? We may never know the true motivations, but even that points us to the brokenness of humanity.

A Brokenness with Hope

All of this to say that the place of the artist has to be one that helps us to open our eyes and peer behind the curtain. It’s important to do that—to show the brokenness of humanity, to even protest in response to it in its various shades—but to do so without a self-righteousness about it.

The Christian story offers hope, one where God Himself will restore the world and bring humanity to be who it is supposed to be. He has already begun this project through the offering of forgiveness and reconciliation through Jesus. What it also does, however, is bring humility. This is one reason why I think it’s the truest story you’re going to find. It tells us like it is: we all suck, we all think we don’t, and we all need a wake-up call about how much we do. But we are also made in the image of God, who loves us, and this also makes us beautiful and full of value and worth. We suck, but we are not rejected. We suck, but we are also of infinite worth. We suck, but we have tremendous potential. We suck, but we have a bright future.

The story of politics, however, is frequently one of self-righteousness. “We’re the good guys, you aren’t and must be stopped.” The story of the Kingdom of God, however, is one of humility and unity. “We all suck, but God loves us all, so let’s build together.” Politics can even reflect that and be a part of that, when the people involved choose to make it so. There can be a politics based on Christian values, but that’s a politics that is tremendously challenging to everyone and, I promise, most don’t like it! Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

I think, therefore, we need even better protest songs. Those above have their place, but we need to also protest the heart of things that cause us to do what we do.

My hope is that even in the brokenness of Minnesota, we will see the hope of humanity shining through, and choose the better path.

If I was to write a protest song, that would be my theme.

Heck, maybe even I should :).

You’ve got a great idea. You’ve got expertise to share with the world. You know it’ll be an excellent book, if it could just get done.

But you’re not trained in the craft of writing. Neither do you really have the time. And you’ve realized the A.I. tools produce derivative, average, and even verbose work that sounds just like everyone else.

None of this has to stop you. And it’s where I come in.

I’m Ryan Peter, a best-selling writer, book producer, and book coach.

In short, I am a ghostwriter. I’ve written books, autobiographies, articles and teaching material for leaders and influencers of all kinds: CEOs, politicians, media contributors, entrepreneurs, psychologists, social activists, motivational speakers, pastors, and more. I also do a lot of work with Forbes Books.

Many of my clients include people you probably even know, if you keep up to date with the news. I have written for clients in the U.S., UK, New Zealand, and South Africa. My work has helped some of my clients win several awards and receive international recognition.

I’ve been doing this for twenty years.

I’ve had my work featured in the New York Times, NYR Daily, Forbes, the BBC, CNBC, Mail & Guardian, and many others.

I know how to get a project done. My journalism background helps me grasp concepts quickly and communicate these effectively. This has also given me solid research expertise. With the amount of books I’ve written and the amazing clients I’ve worked for, I draw upon a wealth of knowledge, especially in the leadership space.

I also offer a writing coach service and publishing advice.

CHECK OUT SOME OF MY PUBLISHED BOOKS

You can also read my Substack, Just One Beautiful Thing, where I write about art and culture.

If you’re an entrepreneur, thought-leader or a leader of an organization, having a book is an incredibly powerful tool that will grow the impact of what you’re doing and gets your message out.

Yes, even today when the claim is “people don’t read” and “A.I. will take over.” In fact, in an age where information is so pervasive and easy to access, you need to find a way to stand out.

You don’t need to embark on that journey alone. That’s the job of a ghostwriter—to work with you at every stage of the writing process.

My pitch is simple. You want a book. I want to help you write it. Let’s collaborate and get it done.

CONTACT ME

I initially made this 11-minute lo-fi dreamy track for a podcast project that I ended up abandoning. I’ve updated the track with some improvised guitar, and worked a bit more on the mix and the mastering.

I’ve titled it simply (.) because I honestly couldn’t decide on a name for it!

I hope you enjoy it on this, your first Friday of 2026! Guitar and electric piano are improvised and recorded as such. The guitar was one take and I did do a bit of editing on the timing for the electric piano. As always, no A.I. (not for mastering or mixing either) but all made by the human ear :) .

Listen to it above, or you can also get it at Bandcamp. Feedback always appreciated!

I currently have about twelve demos I’d like to get recorded for a full album. Those songs include lyrics and singing, with lots of guitar and tasty synthesizers. This song however is just an ambient piece. It’s titled “The Walk” as one of my friends listened to it on a walk and said it was the perfect accompaniment to his wet forest surroundings. I like to think of it now as a walk through life, too. It’s a low key jam, completely improvised. No click track. No massive processing. I’ll be releasing ambient tracks while I’m recording my other songs, the first of which I’m recording with producer Paul Roraback.

None of my songs will incorporate the use of A.I. It will be raw, human-made contemplative rock.

If you like the song feel free to share it! Will I get this onto streaming services? We’ll see. If you really like it and would like to give me a tip, you can do so at Bandcamp.

Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, was a self-proclaimed humanist and an atheist. But his show tended towards leaving questions of God open to interpretation and continued discussion. (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine took the religious discussions even further.) While Roddenberry’s atheism wasn’t a massive influence on the show as time went by, the humanism element certainly was.

But this seems lost on so many today. Humanism has been a foundational value of Western society. It certainly was what gave the Renaissance so much energy and vitality—and since then, a lot of amazing things happened! But as I look across the rising philosophical and political spectrum today, it appears to me that everyone wants to reject humanism. Most don’t even realize they are!

Undergirding the vast array of what could be called humanism today is the basic idea that human beings have intrinsic worth. This idea is where Christianity and Greek philosophy always agreed. However, one of the things I find fascinating about our time is how the technology of Star Trek is something our society continues to chase after, but the humanism continues to be rejected. The core idea of humanism is not to evolve past humanity but to always stay human—but to reach our full potential as human beings; to discover who we truly are.

I want to submit that it's time we go “back to the sources”, just like the early humanists did, and recover a conviction that human beings do indeed have intrinsic worth.

If we don’t do this, we will not go back to some romantic pre-modern, pre-Renaissance time. The Middle Ages were intellectually wonderful (for another article, perhaps, to prove my case) but that’s not where we’ll end up. We will, in fact, fall into more ancient times—the times when people worshiped despicable gods like Baal and your worth depended on your ability to wield power with brute force.

Discovering the Beauty of Being Human

A visual representation of the conflict I’m setting up here between humanism and where our culture is going may be found quite succinctly in the world of art. Renaissance Art focused on form and beauty, with attention paid to anatomy, realism, depth, and humanizing religious figures. It admired the human being.

Modernism, however, moved toward Impressionism, Cubism, and abstract forms. I have no problem with these art forms, but the point is to simply show visually the philosophies under girding the culture.

Here with Picasso we can see a more subjective approach.

Perhaps the world’s most famous artist today is Banksy, the street artist that frequently uses his art as a form of protest.

But even more, what is perhaps the most pervasive art on the Internet today is Furry art—anthropomorphic animals.

This leans into a whole subculture which, as one writer puts it, can be explained as a “post-humanist performance” where people can take on the identity of a Furry and “recreate themselves on their own terms.” You can probably see where this is going. While the Furry community is frequently ridiculed, you don’t have to go far on the internet to find types of Furry art everywhere. In fact, it seems Furry culture and Japanese anime have collided to form the ultimate picture you’ll see everywhere at online discussion forums today—the girl with cat ears.

Elon Musk leans strongly into this culture. His Grok’s “Waifu” really encapsulates much of this culture.

While I am not going to get into a debate here on what constitutes “true” art, I am simply showing that we’ve gone from art where the human being is depicted in positive and beautiful terms to zoomorphism—where the human being has been “animalized”. This can tell us a lot about culture today. Is our spirituality, likewise, becoming more like a secular animism? That’s something to think about.

Of course, one could argue that I’m comparing some of the world’s greatest art with randos on the internet, and that would be a fair criticism. I don’t know if zoomorphic cat girls existed somewhere in the Renaissance, as some sort of doodle on a scroll somewhere. (I do know that we see plenty of weird stuff in medieval art!). But my point is that art at a Renaissance level seems exceptionally difficult to come by. Maybe we can 3D print a “David” these days, and it would be as anatomically correct. But I’m not drawing a comparison around effort, I’m drawing a comparison in the content that is inspiring people and driving our collective imagination.

Everyone’s Favorite Android

Okay, so what does this have to do with Star Trek?

Technology has often been used as a tool to wield power, unless its development is driven by more humane considerations. This would require a core humanist philosophy to undergird development. Today, tech is not guided by such a philosophy. I don’t look at Sam Altman (OpenAI) or Mark Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook) and see examples of people guided by what is good for human beings. Steve Jobs might have been one of the last to care about whether the tech would make our lives better.

So we’re seeing all this played out in real time today in the technological sphere. Elon Musk, for example, claims to be “for humanity” but in fact his actions are clearly more in line with transhuman thought. For Musk, the survival of humanity is dependent on humanity’s ability to evolve into something beyond humanity. He has publicly stated, in various ways, that humanity should merge with A.I.

What’s driving our collective imagination is the idea of evolving beyond humanity—to “recreate” ourselves “on our own terms”, just like the Furry community. I’ve argued this in more detail here at Just One Beautiful Thing before. A.I. is being developed very much in this direction. Whereas Star Trek’s humanism claimed that humanity’s full potential is yet to be entirely discovered and through reason, diplomacy, commitment and belief, we’ll find it; transhumanism claims that our potential lies in becoming something other than human.

I’ve found that many technologists use Star Trek as an example of how amazing tech can make our lives, and even how we should consider A.I. to have a soul. Philosophical discussion on whether machines can reach personhood is nowhere better encapsulated than in the Star Trek character, Lt Commander Data, an Android that seeks to become more human throughout the series. A key episode is one called “The Measure of a Man”, in which Captain Jean-Luc Picard must prove Data is a sentient being and therefore to be afforded the same fundamental rights that humanity has come to enjoy and has sought to export throughout the galaxy.

“I am the culmination of one man’s dream,” argues Data at one point, referring to his human creator. “This is not ego or vanity, but when Doctor Soong created me, he added to the substance of the universe. If, by your experiments, I am destroyed, something unique – something wonderful – will be lost. I cannot permit that. I must protect his dream.”

Captain Picard’s closing argument about Data is that, despite being made up of mechanical and computer parts and wires , he is, in fact, sentient, as he possesses self-awareness, ingenuity, and a host of sentient traits. (The undercurrent of the argument, however, touches on how you can’t actually even prove that we are sentient.)

It’s definitely one of the best episodes in the series. But does it prove what many are trying to claim—that A.I. should, indeed—at least one day—be granted sentience and rights? Does it prove that the ultimate end of mankind is a merge of man and machine? That we are to evolve beyond humanity?

No. One of the brilliant things about Star Trek: TNG was that it didn’t preach to you and very often left the questions unanswered. It was trying to get you to think about things and consider a different way forward. But Data’s story was always intriguing because it wasn’t a story of human beings trying to become like Androids, but Androids trying to become human. Humanity was the goal.

This is the opposite of what the technologists and accelerations are telling us. They’re saying that progress requires becoming more than human. But it seems to me that if human flourishing is our goal, we should be concerned about humans, not computers.

The Future is Human

I want to end this by making an appeal to artists and showcasing how Christian theology provides inspiration for humanistic ideals that should be put back into our art. At the core of the Christian faith is not a transcendent God who we can never reach, but a human being who came to be one of us. This is the message of the Christmas season. Jesus became human, entered into life just like we all do (through birth) and suffered the injustice we all suffer in this world to various degrees.

The future of humanity, according to the Christian story, is, in fact, human.

In fact, one of the core problems uncovered in Genesis was that when humanity tried to become “like God”, it fell. Transhumanism is the old, old sin that leads to death, destruction, and the end. The end goal of humanity is not something beyond human, but what humanity was always created to be.

But while Jesus—a human being, who remains human when taken up to heaven at beginning of Acts—is at the center, God is also transcendent. This wonderful double-edged truth of a transcendent God who became human and is now also imminent (imminence through the giving of the Holy Spirit) is why Cathedrals were built with steeples and stained-glass windows and wide-open spaces, and art pieces all around. You step into a cathedral and you feel like you are transported into a space that reflects heaven and earth having come together, just like the promise in Revelation 21. The architecture and art reflected this theology, this idea, core to the Christian faith.

There is much to mine from this that is beautiful and inspiring. It all revolves around the theological idea of sacramentalism—that the physical world is a means through which God pours out his grace upon us; that God is “presencing” Himself with humanity; that heaven and earth are coming together. I’ll close with one more piece of art from Raphael that I think displays this idea perfectly—his “Disputation of the Holy Sacrament.”

The reason why the Eucharist became such a big deal in Christian theology (not such a big deal in Evangelicalism) is because of the way sacramental thought developed. I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds here around the theology of the Eucharist, but I want to emphasize the central idea displayed in this artwork. Here, at the center is the bread and wine—the material substance that represents Jesus’ broken body and shed blood. At this “touch point” between heaven and earth, Raphael shows the dove descending from heaven and Jesus, God the Father, and various saints sitting. Down below people are pointing towards the bread and wine, while others seem deep in study (left), trying to fathom what it all means. People of all kinds of stature gather at the Table to bow before the King of Kings. No matter your status in life, you, too, must eat the simple bread and wine and bow before the same King.

This picture represents the Christian imagination. It’s not about bread and wine possessing new properties when blessed by the priest. Rather, I’m using it to showcase a broader sacramentalism—the idea that humanity is elevated up into the Trinity through the giving of Jesus’ body and blood, not because humanity gets there but because God provides the doorway in. Here, on earth, is where all this action happens. Here, all men are equal in the sight of God.

The human desire to be more than human is one that God has shown to be faulty by becoming one of us. Now, he invites us to look upward while remaining on earth to become all that he created humanity to be—as human. It seems to me that even Star Trek gets this point right.

Technology’s place in this grand scheme is not to move us toward becoming anything other, or less, than human. Technology should assist us in our humanity, not to transcend but to be. Technology should not be all-consuming and in fact should do everything it can to keep us engaged in our material world as human beings.

Today, if you want to insist on a humanist philosophy as a guiding principle for technology, you are labeled as a Luddite. I’ll be a Luddite then if it means that’s what it is going to take to make our engineers and innovators create technology for human beings.

I think that artists right now sit on a grand and wonderful opportunity. It’s going to take a lot of work, but what our core calling is in this generation is to inspire the world once again to have a vision of the future that is focused on beauty, hope, humanity. And God.

Who is it that inspires the imagination of the engineers, the innovators, the technologists? It is actually the artists. Just look at where they’re getting their inspiration from—Blade Runner, Star Trek, and many more besides. (In some cases, however, it seems to me that the many dystopian novels / movies have served as way too much inspiration!)

It is time for artists to see the value in their art and create the kind of art that will inspire the new generation to lay our phones down and explore what it means to truly be human. No matter how popular, or fun (I get it), songs about Jesus making lemonade when life throws you lemons may have their place, but they’re not really going to inspire our culture toward change.

The A.I. art debate is finally reaching the Christian world in the form of an A.I. persona called Solomon Ray hitting the top of the Christian music charts.

To be honest, I think this might be a good thing because the Church has largely been ignoring this topic. Hitting the evangelical church’s favorite art form is definitely going to cause some healthy discussion. Christians generally like their artists to be worshippers—the lifestyle and message of the artist is important, and often even more important than the artistry itself. So when an A.I. persona hits the charts, a lot of Christians hit some ethical dilemmas they perhaps haven’t considered before.

That’s precisely what seems to have happened to Forrest Frank, one of the world’s most popular artists in the Christian genre. In fact, he is so popular that he surpassed Drake in YouTube numbers earlier this year. Just today, when the A.I. persona, Solomon Ray—created by Christopher Jermaine Townsend (also known as Topher)—hit the top of the iTunes chart, Frank had this to say:

“I hate to even bring attention to this, but I want to just let you guys know this is out there, and I think it’s important that we just pause a little bit and kind of ask the questions of like, ‘is it something that we want? At a minimum, AI does not have the Holy Spirit inside of it, so I think that’s really weird to be opening up your spirit to something that has no spirit.”

Townsend or the A.I. persona “Solomon Ray” quickly responded:

“Nothing is morally or immorally right or wrong at this point… It is really more of a preference. You cannot tell somebody’s feelings and impact from music if it’s authentic or fake [or] fraudulent. Who am I to say what God will or won’t use to get the message His people need to them? I am just here being an instrument, and this is an extension of my creativity. So, therefore, to me, it’s art. It’s definitely inspired by a Christian, and it may not be performed by one and I am not sure why that really matters in the end.”

I wanted to jump on this quickly because with someone like Frank talking about this, it’s an opportunity to get people to really think through the A.I. debacle. I’ve been writing about A.I. and art for quite some time and my Substack is about the intersection of art, culture, and faith. I don’t really know any other Christian who has written extensively about this. My impression is I have perhaps spent a little more time than a lot of others thinking through this, and so I’m hoping to add to the conversation with some important thoughts.

In fact, I’m uncharacteristically asking you to share this post because I just don’t know where anyone else is talking about this particularly from a Christian viewpoint. Obviously if there is something better than what I’ve written by someone else, share that instead (and send it to me too, please!) But things are moving quickly and I think we need to help people work through this as soon as possible, otherwise we may end up giving too much space to technology without discernment. I’m worried we’ll all just fall in line with the culture if we don’t push back.

So here we go:

1. The ethics

Any discussion about the ethics with A.I. art has to start with how the technology was made. I find too few want to have this discussion because it presents a massive dilemma.

Generative A.I. technology like Suno (which makes music) is essentially made up of (a) a dataset and (b) a chatbot. I’m simplifying but basically the dataset consists of what the A.I. has ‘learned’ through access to billions (trillions?) of gigabytes of data.

This data was scraped from the internet without permission from any of the original creators of the data. Advocates of Gen A.I. want to claim this is “fair use” as the technology ‘learns just like a human’ and therefore this not a violation of copyright. Legal cases abound. We’ll address the logic of this argument in a moment, but let’s just stick to the ethics for now.

It’s clear that what gives the chatbot tremendous value is what is in the dataset. The chatbot itself has some value, of course, as a tool with unique tweaks etc., but the tool is pretty much useless without a good dataset. So the issue is that the copyrighted work of billions has been used without permission to increase the value of someone else’s product, without compensation to anyone. Then the creators of these tools are selling it all back to us for profit.

This is why so many websites that once were getting good numbers have seen traffic completely drop off, affecting so many businesses. The A.I. produces the answers those websites have. Some say, “That’s competition for you, so what’s the problem?” However, the issue is that the A.I. is getting the answers from those very websites. OpenAI, Microsoft, Google etc. are using someone else’s work to increase the value of their own product, and then lowering / cutting off access to those peoples’ work, and then finding ways to charge us for it.

Suno, as on example, ingested millions of songs without permission from anyone which has greatly increased the efficacy, and therefore the value, of the tool. None of these artists have been compensated, and none were given the option to opt-in to this system. Then even more, Suno is selling all this back to the public—including the artists whose work it used—for profit.

This is such a clear and obvious violation of ethics that this alone should make any Christian question whether or not using this tool for creative works really is “for the glory of the Lord”. My conscience won’t allow me to build creative works on this. I could be stronger on this—and I will be when pressed—but you can work it out in your own mind. As far as I’m concerned, it’s hard to get around the fact that these tools were developed dubiously and continue to be developed in a sinister way that will have massive repercussions to the free flow of information and art in the future. It has repercussions even for free and fair journalism.

Many people—especially a lot of Christians—have boycotted companies in the past due to unethical practices or due to products they were selling. It seems strange to me when those same people want to give A.I. a free pass, but that might have more to do with the next point.

2. The dilemma of being “left behind”

Of course, the dilemma with this technology is none of us want to be “left behind”. Since the 2000s when mp3’s practically gutted the music industry; and since Facebook and social media gutted companies like Kodak; we’re all on our toes about not moving quickly enough with tech. We’re all worried that we’ll lose a competitive advantage if we don’t jump on board and become first adopters.

The technology industry has preyed on this collective fear for a very long time. The fear of being left behind has driven us to accept things from the tech industry that we really should have (and should be now) putting the brakes on.

The Church, of all people, should be teaching others to be discerning about this. I know there’s a tendency towards pragmaticism, but that is a very big problem with our society in general. Consequential and utilitarian ethics rule most of our society, but Christians are called to have a much more broader and deeper ethics system.

3. The Pro A.I. arguments

Let’s quickly address the logic of the main arguments usually presented.

A. The A.I. ‘learns’ just like a human

No, in fact it does not, because it is not a human, but a technology built and owned and run by (usually) a for-profit corporation.

The tech industry is very clever at this type of argumentation. For example, the argument for Napster was that it was ‘just like’ giving your friends a mix tape. The reality is it was not ‘just like’ that at all, it was an entirely different animal.

We’re also told that social media is ‘just like’ having a conversation with your friends, and Mark Zuckerberg’s silly obssession with the metaverse was built on the premise of making a digital world ‘just like’ the physical world. The truth is all of these things are not ‘just like’ the real world, they are their own thing and we’re increasingly learning the dangers of being permanently online.

I think the best way of dealing with something is assessing what it actually is and calling it what it actually is, so we can deal with it as it actually is. A.I. is not a human, it does not learn or operate like a human being. It’s its own thing and we should treat it as such.

B. It’s just a tool

Sure, but that doesn’t mean we should not ask (i) how is the tool being made, (ii) how is the tool being implemented, (iii) how should I use the tool?

At some stage in our world today we all seemed to have subtly bought into the idea that technology always brings with it positive progress, but we have to ask why we think that. Not all technology is actually worth pursuing. Every tech has its downsides and tech with too many downsides has usually been rejected as not being worth using.

The issue is not so much “is A.I. a good tech” but more “is the way A.I. is being developed good?” Even people who love the tech, like Gary Marcus, have been saying for a long time that the answer is no.

The question to ask is if whether by using it you lend credence and support to the way it is being developed. We can’t say, “Well, there’s nothing I can do about that.” The reality is probably more that you don’t want to do anything about it and are just afraid that by not using it you’ll be left behind. But this fear is unjustified. The truth is that if the market does not want it in its current iteration then everyone will be forced to develop it differently. We’ve all got to have courage to stand up to technologists / Big Tech / techbros etc. and demand a more ethically developed technology. We just all accepted social media in the form Silicon Valley produces it and look where that’s got us.

4. Does God use it to get ‘his message’ across?

I’ll now challenge Townsend’s argument above directly. The ethics around the development of A.I. are questionable at best, and actually terrible by my (and I believe any sound) consideration. But let’s look at it from a messaging perspective.

Theologically, Christianity has always taught that God has the remarkable ability to turn anything together for the good—even evil things (Romans 8:28). This does not mean evil things are good, it simply means that God is good at defeating evil. The cross is the main example of this—Jesus’ violent, unjust death becomes the central point of forgiveness, grace, love, and the defeat of evil. God turns it all for the good.

Townsend’s view is very pragmatic and utilitarian, but we’re called to more than just one ethical system. There is also virtue ethics, deontological ethics, relational ethics, biblical ethics, and more. We’re called to more than just a simple “if it works, it’s good” mentality. That’s a reductionism that goes to dangerous places.

My point is that God can use anything to get His message across, and He does, but that does not mean that the medium is now a good one; or even neutral. God even uses evil to get his message across—bad things happening to you can be a wake-up call to make better decisions. That doesn’t make the bad things good, it makes God good.

My conclusion in this is that it doesn’t matter whether the A.I. ‘gets the message across’, you still have to work out if you’re complicit in something unethical—that by using the technology, you’re allowing the continued unethical development of the tools. With Gen A.I. as it stands now, I think using the tools creatively makes you complicit and means you lend your support to the direction these tools are going an how they’re being developed. The message you’re sending is not just in the content but also in the medium you use. Check out communications theorist Marshall McLuhan’s theory, the medium is the message.

5. The soul argument

Let’s look at Frank’s considerations—his worry that A.I. has no “Holy Spirit in it”. He is implying that this means it is not authentic worship and / or can’t give glory to God since it is not a person. The Holy Spirit does not live in a machine, but in a person.

This is a tricky one. Townsend’s retort is that since he is a person using the tool, the artistry carries his heart of worship and intention. It therefore does have a ‘soul’ behind it.

It’s a good argument and one worth considering. For Frank, as a singer, the artistry should be sung by a person. For Townsend, arguably more a poet, the artistry is found in its lyrical content and intention. A similar argument was made by the person behind the A.I. persona, Xania Monet, which also rose to the charts recently.

I think this argument has merit.

Except, of course, it’s not like musicians or singers are not available to collaborate with. Townsend finds the A.I. tools help him bring his vision to life—but so would collaboration. But I bet that if I had to ask Townsend why he didn’t collaborate with musicians to bring his vision to life, his answer would revolve largely around cost, and he would be right. It can cost a lot to get a talented singer! Although, I might challenge him to find other creative ways to get around that problem—for example, form a band.

In this case, it’s hard to argue that an A.I. song has ‘no soul’ but it’s worth thinking about, in a Christian sense, that allowing A.I. music to proliferate might cheapen worship and turn worship music, in particular—already a consumerist enterprise when it shouldn’t be—into something even more consumerist. It does feel weird to hear a computer sing passionately about God and life—there is something soulless about that.

6. Arguments about how A.I. is destroying the internet

Almost every day there are stories and stats coming out about how A.I. slop is killing the internet, and so by using tools like Suno you have to consider how you are contributing to the destruction of the very thing you are using to promote and distribute your music.

Depending on your point of view, the destruction of the internet (as it is now) is perhaps not a bad thing. I do take the view that A.I. proliferation is going to drive us back into the analogue world, and creatively have us collaborate with each other and want to get out and be part of a “scene”. This is actually a good thing, to be honest, and I would gladly see social media in particular fall.

But of course if social media is an important part of your message as an artist, then you should consider how you’re contributing toward its demise.

7. Final arguments about artistry and value

The upshot about A.I. generated art is it will increase the value of human created art. This may not be immediate during our current A.I. hype cycle, but over time, when everyone is using Suno to put their poetry to song, no one will care about your poetry made with Suno to put into song. You become a dime-a-dozen. In short, you cheapen your own art by using a cheap tool to make it.

There will always be a market for cheap knock-off REEDBOK shoes at the flea market. That doesn’t mean that REEDBOK shoes are quality, and no one is impressed by your REEDBOKS. Sure, maybe you bought them because you couldn’t afford anything else, but you know well enough that they’re nothing to show off.

The value of an artwork is determined by more factors than just aesthetics. A Suno-generated song may sound “professional” (although right now there are still issues with it) but when anyone can make something sound “professional” then what sounds “professional” becomes cheap—and “professional” begins to change. People don’t really understand how art morphs and changes and how trends come and go. Even big songs of the past become cultural jokes in the future. Suno-generated work will lack the timeless quality of Pink Floyd or The Beatles or Bach, and no amount of “it’s my expression” is going to change that. This is because art is not just aesthetics but is also about culture, story, personality, its message in time, and more.

How to use A.I. well

With all this, you might be wondering if I use A.I. at all or if there is any way to use it well?

The answer is yes, I do use it for research in my work. My main go-to is Perplexity for this. I do not use it to generate creative work. I find it a helpful tool as part of my research arsenal to point me to what others have written on a topic, and then I cite the research. I see it as a personal librarian helping me out. I ask it very pointed questions and I frequently ask it to provide lots of sources. I never copy and paste its answers to anything.

There is a big difference between A.I. / machine learning, which can be used in a variety of contexts, and generative A.I. like ChatGPT, which is what this post is mainly about. I do not use Suno to make music or polish up my demos. I do not use ChatGPT for any writing. Using these tools to create emails or messages is something I can’t see much wrong with—I think that’s fine—but I do worry that doing so will eventually have negative repercussions on our ability to think and communicate for ourselves. I try and encourage my kids, especially, to not rely on these tools for their thinking—but I think we each must come to our own conclusion here.

In short, I think A.I. can be a wonderful tool in the right contexts, but generative A.I. has largely been developed in an unethical way. I believe OpenAI is especially bad news and I refuse to use any of its products.

Organizations like Fairly Trained are attempting to create a database of A.I. trained ethically. It’s worth checking out and I hope it goes somewhere.

With open source tools, I do not like the idea of the dataset consisting of works where the artist was not given the option to opt in, even if the tools are not being sold for profit. I can only be comfortable with this if the tool is for research purposes only, with adequate ways of citing the original authors.

I think good A.I. use is really just thinking about the ethics and repercussions of these tools carefully, and how I might be complicit in the bigger picture. I hope that helps you in your own journey!

Hundreds of thousands of people visit the Mauritshuis in The Hague (Netherlands) every year to look at paintings. One of those is The Girl with the Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer, dated 1665.

By posting the picture here, you’ve now seen The Girl with the Pearl Earring (if you hadn’t before). The question to ask, however, is if you were given the chance to see it in real life, would you? Or would you say, “I’ve seen it on the internet, there’s no need.”

I would venture to say that most of us would still take the opportunity to see it in real life. There are a few outliers who simply have no interest, but anybody who likes art or has some vague interest in culture or history will go see it—even though we’ve all seen it (and a thousand other iterations) on the internet.

In fact, if you were given the choice of seeing an exact replica in real life or the original, you would still probably opt to see the original—even if you would need to stand in a longer line to see it.

This is the power of presence. We all know that the digital world cannot recreate what it’s like to actually be anywhere. The cyber world can provide some nifty experiences of its own (such as reading this from anywhere in the world) but it can’t replicate what it’s like to be there looking at the painting, Vermeer’s brushstrokes in your face, seeing it up close, and being in the presence of such a beautiful work of art.

And if you go see a replica, you still don’t have quite the same experience. Seeing the original is what matters. The value of the artwork is determined not just by how it looks (which we can see right here above) but what it means and being in the presence of that meaning. (This is why, in some rare cases, a replica may even have value if the story behind that replica bears some significance, or the artist who made it does.)

In 2018, a framed copy of Banksy’s famous mural, Girl With Balloon, pictured above, was up for auction. Bids soon exceeded the presale estimate. Tension was high. The hammer fell on £1.04 million and then suddenly a loud beeping cut through the room. Everyone gasped as the artwork was being shredded through its own frame. Banksy was somewhere in the room and had activated the shredder by remote. Here’s how he did it. But somehow, the shredder got stuck and only half of the picture got shredded.

Most of us who heard about that knew that the artwork had now just increased in value.

Renamed “Love Is In The Bin”, it eventually went up for auction again and can you guess what it sold for? £18.6M—triple what it in itself was originally valued at.

The value is not just in how it looks but in the whole story behind it. The meaning. Banksy is an enigma—no one knows who he is (although it seems like we’re getting close to finding out). His murals have become world famous, and they often have very unique stories behind them. A half-shredded Banksy is, of course, extremely valuable. There’s so much that adds to its value.

Vermeer’s Camera and Banksy’s Shredder

I started with Vermeer because he is an enigma himself. Vermeer’s paintings became famous because of the exceptionally odd realistic look about them. The rumors are that Vermeer used technology as a part to achieve his unique style—a camera obscura, in fact.

It is now generally accepted that Vermeer employed a simple, box-like device, called the camera obscura as an aid to his painting, although there is great debate as to exactly to what extent he used it. Philip Steadman, a London architect turned Vermeer scholar, provided convincing circumstantial evidence—the camera obscura leaves no physical marks of its use in painting—that Vermeer may have even projected image of the camera obscura directly on his canvas where he then comfortably traced its principal outlines with a brush and paint.1

Does this interesting use of technology take away or add to Vermeer’s paintings? Do you now view The Girl with the Pearl Earring differently? Do you wish you didn’t know about Vermeer’s camera obscura?

I’ve chosen these examples rather deliberately as they both showcase the convergence of tech and art, a process that is as old as time. Vermeer used a camera obscura. Banksy used a shredder (a little more obscure, I know, but it increased the value of the artwork, so you can see the point I’m trying to make). But is it the tech that matters? Not really. What gives these works of art value is not digital replication but presence and story. The tech forms part of the story, but something deeper is going on. It doesn’t matter that Vermeer used technology that other artists were not employing at the time. Being in the presence of The Girl with the Pearl Earring is still a wonderful experience. More than just what you can see is going on—there’s meaning you are experiencing.

Today the arts are being mimicked by tech like never before. It’s a time of massive digital replication, regurgitation, convergence, and transformation. Is A.I. lowering the value of art? Will it create a new realm of art, like photography? Will a new art style perhaps emerge in rebellion (like with the Impressionists and photography)? Will A.I.-generated music truly diminish real musicians and singers?

We don’t really know exactly what will happen next, but I’m being increasingly convinced of one thing: the value of any kind of art is not in how it looks (after all, a duct-taped banana came to be worth $6.2 million) or sounds, but in its meaning.

Music and literature will need to take a cue from the art world

The art world has known about this fact for a long time, but musicians and writers need to begin thinking the same way. Up to now, one of the key elements of a thriving music and book publishing industry has been scale. Being able to record music, polish it, and then release it originally on vinyl, then 8-track, then cassette tape, then CD, saw the music industry reach a massive pinnacle. But technology, and the mindset of scale, is what came to bite the music business in the bum back in the Napster days. And now in the streaming and A.I. days, the technology of scale is eating up the entire enterprise.

On the books side, a New York Times bestseller was one of the best metrics of success. It’s a numbers game. Scale is seen to have value.

Scale is what you’re taught to think about if you want to be a professional musician or writer. The value of your music has often been very dependent on the amount you can put out. The same thing occurred with literature sometime in the late 20th century. With the internet what began to matter most was content. Music and literature have become content. But scale is not really how the art world thinks. Duplicated art does not have much value—what has value is the original.

How does this translate to music as an art form? What does it mean about writing? Well, frankly, I don’t really know yet. I do think overall, however, the journey will be about determining what is valuable about your art. What makes your art valuable will in some way be defined by what makes it rare. You’ve got to consider what truly makes your music, your writing, valuable, because more content isn’t actually all that valuable. It’s increasingly less valuable.

Here’s what I think. Ultimately, what makes your art rare is you.

But Also More Than You

But yet I think there is something even deeper to tap into. What increases the value of you in the art world is your relationships. The Impressionists are such a good example of this. Here’s the thing: when artists get together, something exciting emerges. Art is ideally not a solitary activity. It’s the energy that comes from the relationships within a community that creates something exciting, new, and valuable. (This is why churches, when focused on the bigger picture, can be very exciting.) It’s why I think bands are generally more exciting than solo artists. The collaborative nature of humans getting together with the same vision in mind, but with the little personality quirks; the different way we each think; the mystery of getting on the same wavelength (which some even think has to do with the quantum realm)… all this creates something very unique.

In a tech-driven world with hyper-individualistic algorithms, human-driven collaboration is a rarity. Team is a rarity. It’s always a rarity, really, because it creates something entirely unique that nothing else can truly create. We might get cheap knock-offs, but nothing can actually replace presence. And there is a kind-of ‘extra’ presence that forms when human beings are working together to create art (or any venture, really). Something about that becomes its own thing that can’t really be captured in a bottle.

In the face of today’s challenges, artists who want to remain artists and actually make a living for themselves, rather than getting in on the numbers game (which is a cheap treadmill, really) will need to rethink where the value really lies. The tech allows us to have our own mini studios on our laptops these days; or to completely self-publish our own books from end to end. This is very empowering. But what happens when everyone is doing it? When everyone is ‘producing content’, content means nothing.

When I can create a ‘top quality sounding’ song from Suno in a matter of minutes, even if I’m plugging in my own demos, what will give my song value? I become a dime-a-dozen. It may even be a good song, but so what? There are a lot of good songs.

I keep hearing about how people can now ‘finally tell their stories through song’ using these tools. (Not like they actually couldn’t before—it’s not like musicians never existed until now.) But all that’s going to happen is you become another neighbor making your music on Suno. Or another neighbor with a self-published book. Where’s the rarity in that? There’s nothing unique here. What gives that value?

But you and your friends, that’s unique. That has value. Maybe not everyone will care. But someone will. Many will. These are the people you actually want to reach. And you’ll be making art with others and actually living, rather than slaving over a laptop and cutting another track, editing another video, or writing another article to meet the increasing quota demanded by the slop eaters and their slop making platforms which repeat only one word, again and again and again: more.

They can have their more, but not from me. I want to live.

Fascinated by this, I went to go see what the Billboard top 40 (The Hot 100) looks like this week (October 31, 2025).

It consists of twelve Taylor Swift songs. Every other artist on the chart are also solo artists, with the exception of fictional K-Pop groups from the K-Pop Demon Hunters movie. (Hunter/X, Saja Boys) and Katseye, a K-Pop inspired girl group.

There are no bands in the top 40, and neither have there been bands in the top 40 (or even the top 100) for a very long time, except for some exceptions like Coldplay. In fact, when bands do appear, they’re often not new bands, but old bands re-releasing something.

I don’t think this is necessarily unusual in the history of the Billboard Top 100, but I just never thought about it until recently. And the reason I was thinking about it is that, in the wake of the A.I. music “revolution” (it’s not), I have to admit I’m more into bands than ever.

Why bands are more exciting

Back in July, I wrote about the A.I. “band” The Velvet Sundown (which, by the way, has dropped from a million monthly listeners to about 238,000—showcasing how gimmicky A.I. music probably is) and how it affected me. I wondered at the time if over thirty years of honing my musical craft had become worthless.

But since then, I have been more creative than ever. It doesn’t show in my Substack posts because I’ve been working on writing books for clients and working on my music. But it’s amazing to me how this whole A.I. debacle has actually inspired me to write more music. Why? Because I think it made me realize just how valuable music made by humans really is. While the idea around A.I. music generators is to cheapen music, it’s kind of having the opposite effect—at least for me.

And I don’t think I’m the only one. My prediction since this whole A.I. shtick started was that people will want to connect to people. I wrote in the beginning of the year how the “scene” will come back—many people are progressively getting tired of connecting with algorithms and want to connect with flesh and blood. Go see your friend’s band play. Learn an instrument. Grow together. Be part of an exciting underground scene. True connection is becoming valuable to people again.

It’s all made me fall in love with bands again. My best of friends, Kirsten Pearse, visited me this last week—a drummer. Back in the 2000s, we had a top 40 hit in South Africa with this track:

We jammed some of my new songs together and it was fantastic. Then we played the first song we ever did together and this time it sounded a million times better. It’s amazing how much more skilled we’ve become! Then, as we hung out for over a week, we reminisced about some of our favorite indie bands during the 90s and 2000s. One of my lesser-known favorites:

Here’s the thing with bands: it’s about collaboration. A band sounds the way it does because of a collection of committed individuals who each bring their own creativity to the overall sound. While my brother-in-law, Jonno Warmington, was the principle songwriter for Jonno’s Cure above (and he is an excellent songwriter - here’s his latest album!), the band would not have sounded like it did without my friend Kirsten on drums—and our other friends on keyboard (Hilton Holt), bass (Gareth Banks), and, dare I say, me on guitar.

I’ve always preferred bands over solo artists. I have some favorite solo artists, like Paul Simon, Josh Garrells, Sam Fender. But bands are still much more fun. Bruce Springsteen said in 2014 at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame of the E Street Band that he has played with for over 50 years: “I told a story with the E Street Band that was bigger and better than I could have done on my own.”

Bands tell good stories. Sure, many times it’s a story of a band breaking up. But come on, when the Gallagher brothers finally got together for Oasis this last Summer, it was, as the Brits say, “biblical.” It was dubbed as the feel-good event of the year. And I’m not just saying this as a middle-aged fan. The only person I know in my circles who managed to actually see them (in Chicago) is 16 years old, and he paid over $600 a ticket—that’s how desperate he was. When I asked him to give me a download of the event, he said it was one of the best things he has ever been at. “It was absolutely epic,” were his words. This random forum post shows how many young people love Oasis. I know it’s all anecdotal, but it’s saying something. It’s not nostalgia—it’s the longing to connect together over something, which is what bands represent.

A Radio Revival?

Another fascinating trend is a Gen Z college radio revival. Here’s what writes:

Ten years ago, WCBN (Michigan) was struggling to fill three-hour programming blocks, says GM Anja Sheppard. Today, it’s the “fullest schedule we’ve had in recent memory,” with shows reduced to one-hour due to “such demand from students to be on air.”

At WRFL (Kentucky), “we’ve had some of the most exponential growth this station has seen in its 37 year history,” says GM Aidan Greenwell. “We’ve gotten to the point where we simply don’t have enough time to allow everybody on the show schedule,” with 350 signups at the student interest fair this year, 100 shows on the schedule and around 120 people currently staffing the station.

Event attendance at WRFL has also doubled year after year: the station’s 37th birthday bash headlined by Geese drew a packed crowd “from across Kentucky and out of state” in February.

Geese is a band.

Radio is about connecting with human beings. There’s something extremely comforting about late night radio that’s not programmed but raw and even imperfect. I even wrote a song about it, which I’m busy recording for release soon. Hearing a voice over the airwaves, especially late at night when all is quiet and sometimes even lonely, echoes something beautiful about us: we long to know we are not alone. We want connection.

So I want to add to my prediction about where music is going. Taylor Swift is dominating, and has for awhile. The k-pop thing will remain for quite awhile still. But something is brewing underground—this weird, strange idea of friends playing music together. It’s not about sounding polished; it’s not about sounding like K-Love radio; it’s not about Instagram. It’s about connecting.

Punk and rock music has always been about connecting. It’s that attitude that brought the rock revival in the 90s; the skater punk scene in the 2000s. The whole hippie movement from the 60s had this as one of its core attributes—people wanted to connect over something; a cause, an idea, a sense of “we’re in this together.”

Things can change quickly. When grunge suddenly became mainstream in the early 90s, it was literally overnight. Radio DJ’s have stated that it literally changed from one day to the next.

The change I’m predicting will probably take some time, but I think in two or so years, we’ll see a very interesting resurgence of bands being very popular. I certainly think a change in the music industry will be visible by then. It doesn’t matter that A.I. music exists—or that UMG just reached a deal with A.I. music platform Udio that effectively gives UMG the power to make A.I. music with its massive catalog. A.I. music will have its place. But the real action will still be with real people you can connect with. Bands are far more interesting than bland A.I. generated music that might still sound good but has no character. I, for one, am excited about where the future is going. We’ll always have a Taylor Swift, and probably even a Velvet Sundown, but something else is also brewing, and there is going to be a lot of people interested in it.

Because if rap dropping out of the top 40 isn’t a clear sign of a change coming, I don’t know what could be!