Digital Inventory

Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing, Or Is There?

The Future Isn’t What it Used to Be

It’s the Holiday Season. Once time left till Christmas shrank to a few days, I started seeing adverts for eBooks. Whenever people find out I work in the book industry they get a solemn look on their face and say, “Real Books are dead aren’t they?” As soon as I tell them print books are alive and well, they look confused. Then I offer the phrase “Screen Fatigue,” and this starts the wheels turning.

Then comes a sigh that leads to the next question. “Aren’t books bad for the environment?”

Well, two things are true.

eBooks aren’t killing print books and paper manufacturers plant trees. Of course, there is waste from making books, nonetheless, paper manufacturers work very hard to be environmental stewards, in some cases they are industry leaders. But I know inside of this conversation is the assumption that eBooks, audio, and podcasts have no physical impact. But that’s not true either.

Electronic Space is Infinite?!

My son told me his friend made a 400 hour long playlist. He wanted me to think this was really cool. I never know what to do with this type of brag. I hate to treat him like he’s from another world, but in a sense he is. I grew up with records, books, and compact discs not digital footprints. Besides that, the idea that excess for excess sake, even digitally, turns me off. We live in a time where the digital space of things pushes us into an abstract world. 8 billion dollars doesn’t sound abstract does it? If it was in a room, 8 billion dollars would be a mighty stack but the digital version disappeared from Bankman Fried., “Ho Hum,” was the reply, at least on the part of Bankman Fried.

Space Trash from https://vienna.usmission.gov/2022-copuos-stsc-space-debris/

“We’re tidying up your timeline”

Recently, I got a notice from Reedsy, the online service where I typeset my book Old Timer’s Blues. The email goes on to say, “To keep Studio running well, we clear the revision history of books that haven’t been accessed for a while.” The conclusion I get from this is that the money to keep up the data of thousands of novels is starting to pinch the folks at Reedsy.

My friend Rob (Who has an excellent Substack) sent me this screenshot of a library book about how the physical world is important. However, it’s only available as an eBook through the library. Rage!!
It’s called The Extinction of Experience. It seems funny that there are only two versions of an eBook available when there is no literal stock of the book anywhere, the physical world important or not.

The limitation of eBook copies to libraries is a protection for the publisher. By the way, Publishers handled tech much better than record makers protected their ability to monetize. But where do those two eBooks live? Even though they aren’t real books, they still exist somewhere.

The Cloud is Getting Heavy

Those eBooks live in The Cloud. The Cloud now has a pretty big footprint on its own due to the energy needed to maintain data. This quote from an article by MIT PRESS

“The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours (TWh) annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states.”

But forget the Cloud and its hungry hippo needs. Let’s look at this news about the consumption involved with Ai. Microsoft’s Ai energy needs are so great that they are looking into reopening 3 Mile Island. I’m sure companies are storing eye watering, teeth rattling amounts of info but what gets my attention is the amount of music going on the pile. “My engines can’t take much more of this!!” Scotty proclaims. Scotty better get some new storage because there are now 120,000 new uploaded tracks EVERY DAY.

It might be a lot of music filling our airwaves from streaming but the data farms are making noise in another way. Plain old noise is raking in the dbs that change the environment. Check out this New York Times article on the impact of data farms on a small town.

I’m surprised that Reedsy is the only service I’m hearing from but I figure it’s a matter of time.

Futuromania Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow's Music Today

While stewing on the above, I was reading FuturoMania by Simon Reynolds. Here is a link to his blog. It’s pretty darn groovy.

Futuromania makes me realize how dead rock n roll, blues, and country and anything else for that matter is and has been for a while. But at the same time, all music is alive at once at our fingertips.

As much as the book is about technology as it is about how we consume music or make music with technology, it’s part and parcel. The book is a wide ranging trip on sound and time.

It illustrates what the future meant to us and what the reality is now that it’s arrived.

Mix Tapes, Mixed Results

Reynolds takes us into the history of electronica. In the 70’s synths became more readily available though clunky experimental machines had existed in nascent forms for a long time. By the 80’s music makers embraced the computer and in turn music from the 80s was portrayed as the future, and in 2024 is still how future sounds are portrayed.

When Daft Punk went to follow up their album Random Access Memories they had to retreat to the 70s way of making things, and not the early synths of the era but the way recordings were made and played. The Robot Helmet music punchers said, ““The only way forward was back”

The result is that “Robot Rock” sounds more like AC/DC than Silver Apples but the beat is computer tight in a way Rock never could be. Early synth bands had to lug gigantic machines around to replicate their records on stage. Think of Kraftwerk. Now, these sounds are available in our pockets but inventiveness has stalled out. “The past isn’t what it used to be,” to paraphrase Yogi Berra.

Daft Punk. So cool I can’t stand it.

One funny point Reynolds makes is that The Star Wars Cantina that sounded so exotic to GenX ears in our youth is just Benny Goodman playing on things that look like vacuum cleaners. He continues with a deep dive on the treatment of music in Sci Fi literature and film. Sounds like Ambient and New Age music were music developed as aural medicine and got a short shrift in Science Fiction literature as a sedative for the masses. Science Fiction books portray music as a controlling drug or a commodity that one day robots will churn out symphonies to put in our ears and lull us into comas. If you read about Ai generated Spotify jazz, you might think this future is now.

The book has a chapter on how AutoTune was developed by a scientist that was using the same technology to look for Oil Deposits.. I feel like I heard Cher’s song “Believe” in 1998 so many times I didn’t know what I believed anymore. The unintended consequences of technology are numerous. But in cases like this, the unintentional becomes a new tool that reveals new sounds.

By the end the book is so full of ideas and songs and it’s a little exhausting. I can’t read a paragraph without going, “Well, what does that band sound like?” which says more about my music knowledge than it does his book. The book is a fascinating read about art, tech, and time. and the crazy thing is that everything he mentions I can listen to on my phone. But in doing so I break my reading concentration, which is another topic in itself. It reminds me of this book-

ReSearch Books

I used to own this book ReSearch Incredibly Strange Music and I couldn’t listen to any of this stuff when I bought the book in the mid 90’s. I had to read about it and just imagine it. I bought it at Tower Books in Nashville which is now demolished and a hotel stands where it once was.

Data is Space and the Future is Time

The book gets philosophical, while talking about music and tech, it becomes about life and how it is experienced. The future is an idea, a promise, requiring a faith that things will be better in the future. In the 80’s the future seemed better and now the future does not, now the future seems very uncertain. In so many words, the book Futuromania says, the past is flat because of the internet. The world is flat too, you can hear anything from anywhere.

Our brains are adapting to these changes? But what I notice is there are speed bumps in my neighborhood now. There are speed bumps on the street where we stay in Florida. Everyone is in a hurry playing GTA behind the wheel. Did we used to need all these speed bumps? If not, is the internet to blame for our impatience? I can think of no better culprit.

The internet has made a lifetime of stuff accessible today. A lifetime of trips to the record store, the bookstore, the theater, could be fast forwarded through in a few weeks. Time, despite all of this, remains the number one asset we have. If I make art, how much time will it take? If I consume art? How much time am I going to take to listen to, or watch, or read a piece? The library used to give you two more weeks when a book was overdue. Now, they don’t have overdue books. They erased that system and that makes me a little sad. I imagine a movie where a man has two weeks to live and asks the library for an extension. I suppose in a few years his data can be compiled to keep his facsimile going.

Real or Not

I have a friend who is a professional bass player and he refuses to use any music streaming service so if he wants to listen to something he has to go to the store or order it. That massively cuts into what, where, and when he can listen, but I appreciate the monk-like devotion and given that his work depends on people buying music, who can blame him? But it feels like a microcosm of all the issues. The real book. The eBook. The physical energy. The data energy. Trying to push off the future? But the future isn’t what it promised? Whether it’s Hollywood on Strike or Longshoremen, it’s hard to know where the real and not so real leave us on the balance of things.

But like my friend, I buy books because I work in the book industry. I’ve run so many P&Ls with scenarios for unearned advances that libraries and used bookstores make my eye twitch.

That makes me think of dock workers striking to hold back automation.

In Q4 an East Coast Port Strike was on the horizon. The Port Strike came, striking cold blood fear into Q4 and went. However, there was one topic of discussion, that of Ai automation, that was tabled to be revisited in January 2025. I feared that one could last longer but then I learned that the West Coast went through this and came to a fairly quick resolve. The matter of moving real things around is hard work no matter how you cut it.

I talked to a guy in the Logistics end of things and he said it sounds like the Unions will probably end up calling Ai other things and using it. But I also read articles that suggest Unions will curtail Ai use to protect jobs which leaves US ports inefficient compared to others in the world.

But really, I don’t think we will have a choice for much longer. The average age of a longshoreman right now is 39. Google guesses 62 is the average retirement age. We aren’t having enough children in this country to fill infrastructure and immigration remains a controversy, so things could get interesting.

We might end up needing robots to unload ships and to print books for that matter. The US and China both are projected to shrink by the end of the century. If you’ve been in a car through any of the South’s old small towns you know they are shrinking. China has ghost towns full of empty apartments. While these are both results of rural loss and big city gain, the total amount of replacement needed isn’t happening. Here’s an article on Robots making Houses. 2025 promises to be a very Philip K. Dick kind of year.

Why are there less people? Maybe we are all on our phones all the time? Stuck behind speed bumps?

This article from the Guardian notes that sex in movies has fallen by 40%. My kids often joke about the content in movies that is “80’s PG.”. This article in The Ringer attributes the fall in US movies sex with US movie companies trying to sell into the world market. So it’s the rest of the world that are the prudes? Maybe it’s a plot to get the robots in control! I am kidding. A little.

Reminiscent Of Nostalgia

Recently, I Saw Weezer with my son. I was never a big Weezer fan but the nostalgia for me was suffocating. The timeline. The time. The era. It was 30 years ago. When Weezer first was around, I was around, as in, I was in a band with a future. The excitement for bands in the late 90’s was effervescent because there was a new tech fueling a ton of cash, Compact Discs, into the business but the internet hadn’t flattened all music into one flat free plate-the past wasn’t so readily available. You weren’t in competition with eternity and the business still had a form and function. By the way, Weezer was rad.

Weezer, Live in Nashville, 2024. Bridgestone Arena. Photo by author.

When I stand in Liturgy I think about how I wish I was smart enough to get Charles Taylor. Here is an excerpt for what I’m talking about. I understand it but do I experience it?

“In God’s time there is a sort of simultaneity of sacrifice and Crucifixion. Similarly, Good Friday 1998 is closer in a way to the original day of the Crucifixion than mid-summers day 1997. Once events are situated in relation to more than one kind of time, the issue of time placing becomes quite transformed. Why are higher times higher? The answer is easy for the eternity which Europe inherits from Plato and Greek philosophy. The really real, full being is outside of time, unchanging. Time is a moving image of eternity. It is imperfect, or tends to imperfection.”

Let’s end it here, thinking of the above musings on time, the future, and how music relates to the past and present and this “The really real, full being is outside of time, unchanging. Time is a moving image of eternity. It is imperfect, or tends to imperfection.”

Charles Taylor’s book. I’ve tried many times but always failed to make it very far.

Thanks for reading. See you in 2025.