I happened to watch Pitch Perfect (2012) the other night with my wife. Now, that’s a funny movie. And Adam Devine is a comedy treasure.
Jokes aside, there’s a part of the film when aspiring musician Beca (Anna Kendrick) volunteers at the campus radio station. There she works alongside Jesse (Skylar Astin), another student with big musical aspirations. They mostly hang out amongst stacks of LPs, serving as college DJs.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a dramatized version of a school radio station. “Saved By the Bell” offered a similar storyline when Zack Morris and the gang took over Bayside High School’s Tiger Beat.
Why are we talking about this?
For one simple reason. Late at night, laughing along to Pitch Perfect’s one-liners (“Look, just so you know, I’m not a total nerd. I also happen to be super-into close-up magic.”) I had an epiphany: Tech doesn’t just disrupt whole sectors, making “indispensable” products obsolete. (Most phones now come with cameras and calculators once sold as stand-alone items.) No, tech changes how we relate to one another. Specifically, tech transforms activities we once did collectively (DJing together in a sound booth) and makes them solitary endeavors.
Here’s another example: I grew up loving The Doors. I must have seen Oliver Stones’ 1991 eponymous biopic a hundred times. Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison is just that good. He even sings all The Lizard King’s songs.
Here’s the point: Several iconic scenes from The Doors feature the band, the engineers, session players, and groupies hanging in the studio as they produce iconic tracks such as “The Soft Parade.” Likewise, there are many scenes of groups of people collectively making music in other recent biopics, like Love & Mercy and Elvis.
In a word, these scenes make the creative act seem fun.
Now along comes AI and all that is going out the window. You don’t need a bunch of people to create music anymore. You can do it all by yourself.
All you need is a computer.
With a computer, one human can leverage AI to appropriate the musical stylings of Drake and The Weeknd to produce “Heart on My Sleeve,” the pop song “created” by Ghostwriter and submitted for Grammy consideration. One person armed with a computer can also use AI to mash up Hank Williams singing N.W.A’s “Straight Outta Compton”—producing what’s being called “Hanksta Rap.”
More than that, one person using AI can sound musically gifted.
How? According to BBC News, through the 2018 app Boomy, “You choose from a number of genres, click on ‘create song’, and the AI will compose one for you in less than 30 seconds. It swiftly picks the track’s key, chords, and melody. And from there you can then finesse your song. You can do things such as add or strip-out instruments, change the tempo, adjust the volumes, add echoes, make everything sound brighter or softer, and lay down some vocals.”
Admittedly, the article makes it clear the output quality can be subpar. It often sounds “computer generated.” But remember: We are talking about software that’s five years old—pre ChatGPT. Heck, we might as well be talking about the “Mad Men” era—it feels that long ago, in tech years.
The point is that Boomy, and many other AI music-generating apps like Splice, Trymusicflow, and Jamahook, now put regular people in the creative driver’s seat. They give us unprecedented abilities. (Just imagine telling Jim Morrison back in 1966 at the Whiskey a Go Go that there will come a day when, through tech, anyone can sound like him singing any song they choose.)
To even start to grok the powers we now possess we would do well to consult Marshall McLuhan. Like us, McLuhan lived through a time of tremendous technological upheaval. Back in the mid-20th century, the Canadian philosopher struggled to comprehend the rise of global mass media transmitted electronically via emerging TV sets, phones, and video cameras.
Frankly, he often felt overwhelmed by such tech.
There seemed to be no precedent to enable people to meet the moment. Then he recalled a short story by Edgar Allan Poe called “A Descent into the Maelstrom.” The tale features three fishermen suddenly sucked into a whirlpool while at sea. This vortex nearly defies words it’s so terrifying. And though the narrator is a competent seaman, he finds himself at a loss to save himself.
This situation, thought McLuhan, was analogous to the world he found himself in. All around him were people unable to process so much change so quickly. It upended everything that had come before, demolishing reality.
Yet McLuhan did find a way to meet his moment. He suggested we could take something from the narrator’s survival approach. After watching his companions perish, the seaman decides to learn from their mistakes.
In “Footprints in the Sands of Crime” (1946), McLuhan writes: “The sailor in his story The Maelstrom is at first paralyzed with horror. But in his very paralysis there is another fascination which emerges, a power of detached observation which becomes a scientific interest in the action of the strom. And this provides the means of escape.”
McLuhan elaborates further in “The Mechanical Bride” (1951): “Poe’s sailor saved himself by studying the action of the whirlpool and by co-operating with it. The present book likewise makes few attempts to attack the very considerable currents and pressures set up around us today by the mechanical agencies of the press, radio, movies, and advertising. It does attempt to set the reader at the center of the revolving picture created by these affairs where he may observe the action that is in progress and in which everybody is involved.”
Interpreting McLuhan’s observations written almost 75 years ago allows us a fighting chance to face our own unparalleled moment. Like the mass media sage, we find ourselves adrift at sea contemplating deep fakes, generative AI, virtual influencers, AI companions, chatbots, and so many extant cultural artifacts that would have been mere gibberish back when our biggest fear was a Y2K meltdown.
But as another 1960s vocal impresario once sang, “the beat goes on.” Post-COVID, here we are in 2023 ensconced in our home offices surrounded by our endless screens and so many newfangled gizmos and applications. Whether we’re building a website or taking a new product to market, we can do what it once took entire organizations—alone.
But what if we still need the human touch to thrive?
In that case, we may still turn to tech—but with a twist. Consider how Ashley Schaer empowers her clients. A “fractional COO,” she gives small businesses an edge inaccessible only a few years ago—before collaborative software enabled solopreneurs to go it alone.
“The C-suite arrangement exists in part, so the CEO needn’t be an expert on every topic,” says Schaer. “They hold responsibility for the entire organization, yet rely on a COO and other top execs to handle areas where they are weak. Today’s solopreneurs can achieve the same results without massive offices or a cadre of highly paid executives. It all comes down to finding one expert partner.”
COOs are notoriously left-brained thinkers—number crunchers, practical, detail oriented—and Schaer is no exception. “Think of me as Roy Disney to his brother Walt Disney
DIS
Zooming out, the inner luddite in so many of us is sometimes tempted to throw up our hands in disgust at our brave new world in which teens spend hour after hour on TikTok—or at the very idea of OnlyFans, a porn subscription site that often feels like little more than a mashup of 20th century sex hotlines, mixed in with a video component and a sprinkling of social media interactivity.
But like with so many things—even lethal maelstroms—there’s a silver lining to be found. Sans our technological tools I wouldn’t be banging out this article on my laptop in a Seattle airport before my flight boards. Neither could I upload it for you, dear reader, to enjoy the content wherever you happen to be.
Despite such net positives, I find myself coming back to this idea of how tech breeds loneliness. Coworking conduits such as WeWork were meant to assuage these concerns. Ditto for networking mixers at which the laptop class can get out from behind its keyboards for some good old fashioned face time.
But is it enough?
That remains to be seen. For now, I won’t stop rewatching old films recalling how we used to come together with wonder. Time’s arrow is forever set in one direction. We cannot change that. Nor can we halt tech’s inexorable march. Still, my hope is that in the midst of enjoying our newfound powers and productivity we may remember what makes it all worthwhile: each other.
You and me.
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