hi friends 🐛🌱
I hope this letter finds everyone having a fruitful Virgo season so far – we’re preparing for the harvest and seeing our seeds come to fruition! clearing out the corners to make space for the new! or…simply catching our breath after a difficult summer for some. Either way, we all have something to be proud of. I have heard it’s been a very turbulent season for many, I know I barely made it through unscathed. Autumn always brings an air of optimism for me, maybe it’s the reminiscent feeling of the scholastic book fairs that always took place in October. In my mind, I always return to that refreshing feeling that anything is possible when fall starts to approach.
As always, let’s allow this moment together to sweetly succumb us to check in with our body and give it what it needs -be it a couple of deep breaths or a little treat to enjoy with this muse-letter. If it’s been a while since you danced, let us dance together or stretch -especially if your neck is shaped like the letter C right now. it’s okay, I will keep this between us.
🎶 Now playing: Dream About You All Through The Night // Sunni Colón 🎶
The Muse-letter Music Club 𓈒ㅤׂ 𝜗𝜚
Speaking of treats, here’s something for everyone who takes instagram story song posts very seriously. Before we dive in, I know I’m always sharing music # on here, but I was a bit curious about what would happen if I made the music discovery a collaborative effort! I love being given new music recommendations from friends so I decided to start the Museletter Music Club to let you see my new song recommendations and mutually also get to hear what you’re listening to! I’m exploring ways to make this little blog of mine an engaging source of connection. A casual third space for us even <3 If the little worm in your ear has a song cycling for days I want to know what it is! Feel free to add here or simply peruse through the songs I’ve planted there already :)
The People v. AI ✶
Let’s get straight to the meat of it -no omnivore. The topic of AI has been, for a long time, on my mind to write about as an analog-loving girl in the digital world. It feels further urgent in light of the recent legal battle against the Internet Archive and its controlled digital lending program by publishing companies like HarperCollins and Hachette. Under this lawsuit, the companies involved are suing the Internet Archive under the claim that their digital lending program is a threat to their business and costing their companies millions of dollars (which has been debunked.) The Internet Archive (IA) was already ruled against in court on March 24th, 2023 but has since also had its appeal rejected by a higher court on September 4th last week on the count of the court rejecting the IA’s fair use defense, resulting in over 500,000 books being lost from public access on the platform.
The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library among the many libraries nationally that have been under threat this year, a resource for educators and students alike. From cultural preservation to educational equity, the banning of books on a national scale and restrictions imposed on educational access are getting stricter and stricter. You can read more about the case details in Hachette v. Internet Archive here, and even sign a petition to the publishers on change.org. Moreover, this raises a question about ethics in the digital era: why is scanning and lending copyrighted print library materials deemed unethical in court while artificial intelligence companies are allowed to make money by replicating content for reproduction without our knowledge or consent?
Watch what they call piracy vs what they call “innovation.”
The definition of artificial intelligence has changed over time, and like with all kinds of change, is often met with wariness and disapproval (as it should.) There was a time when digital audio workstations were deemed as artificial intelligence that sucked the soul out of music. I am currently (still…hehe) reading Dilla Time by Dan Charnas which touches on the life and legacy of the late producer James Dewitt Yancey or J Dilla. Dilla Time is a braided musicology and biography book and easily one of my favorite reads this year (and last year…and the year before that… it’s a hefty book!) for its expansive glimpses into music history. One of the glimpses I was granted through this book is the attitudes around drum machines and digital production at the turn of the century. Not everyone thought Ableton and quantization were cool - a lot of musicians were, as a matter of fact, infuriated. Of course, the perspectives have since changed. Most if not all artists rely on digital audio workstations (or DAWs) to produce, with Steve Lacy even receiving praise for making his debut EP on the Garageband app on his iPhone and being platformed to speak on this in his own TED talk. Without DAWs, a lot of our favorite artists who may not have the same access to music without them wouldn’t be where they are today. no pinkpanthress and no neptunemuse (💔)
However, the artificial intelligence issues taking center stage are not a question of increasing accessibility, at least not in the way it is being used and evolved. The reality is that I know more people frustrated at the ecological consequences of AI rather than folks who are thrilled to use generative AI through the latest TikTok filters. While seemingly innocent, AI training and use can only exist by exhausting natural resources. Water waste in a time of water scarcity in many countries (even cities right here in the states like Flint, Michigan) is inarguably nefarious. But generative AI is everywhere and many have hands in trying to normalize it, from the inability to conduct a Google search without generating an AI response to Instagram/Meta prohibiting its users from opting out of feeding their content to train AI data collection to training AI through forced captchas. Even celebrities have a hand in normalizing police technology (this one hurt me a lot as a long-time fan of Monáe’s music).
While technologies are so important to closing barriers in our world, there must come a point where we must protest by not engaging with them. While AI covers may seem innocent and have honestly, pulled many a giggle from me, we are in a time where it is spiraling out of control at an alarming rate, deepfakes and all. Is it any wonder then, if there are so few little ways to evade having our existences condensed and crammed to feed machines for plagiarism and police training that many people are turning to disengage completely? In a society that wants you hyper-visible and everything is an advertisement, being off the grid in privacy is a luxury.
Piracy as cultural preservation & archivist praxis ୭ ˚. ݁⋆˚
The loss of media has also been ruminating in my mind. With streaming platforms having the final say in what films, TV shows, and musicians get to pass the test of time, some people online are switching back to DVDs and even returning to MP3 players.
The nature of streaming platforms is one I personally grapple a lot with. I recognize the perks streaming allows me as a musician, not only in accessibility to publish music as an independent artist but also in leveling the playing field as a covid cautious artist enforcing additional boundaries that are not often met in the music scene by promoters and event planners (an essay for another day.) However, despite the endless gratitude I feel in seeing my music be enjoyed in countries I never expected, there are so many issues around streaming that need to be addressed. For starters, the wage gap between independent artists (cents) vs CEO Daniel Ek cashing out $118.9 million in shares just this February. That aside, while it feels pleasing to have everything from our music to film be so personally curated, the ability for generational media to be lost forever and algorithmic suppression brings me grief.
A big part of my music taste was built off the exposure to 80s radio and 70s soul music as a child, all thanks to radio and having close relationships with the elders in my family. A lot of the songs they grew up listening to would be burned on CDs, and those CDs are the only trace of existence some of those songs I grew up listening to have. There are countless songs I can only find on YouTube (if at all) due to a random person’s decision to archive them on the platform years ago. I believe many of us rely on the seemingly immortal life of the internet to always find our way back to the songs that adorned our childhoods or media that we grew up on, but it really hit me how easy it is for many of the things we love to become obsolete without a trace.
Those who are close to me know I was in a traumatic accident earlier this year which resulted in my childhood car being totaled. Amongst all the horrible feelings, symptoms, and trauma that arose from being in a car accident, one of the changes that brought me sadness was the loss of the built-in CD player of our old car. At first, I didn’t care, it had been years since I burned a CD and my mom and I had been playing music out of my iPhone because we never brought CDs in the car anymore. By the grace of God, after a lot of financial stress, we were able to get a new car and I was thrilled to aux through the Bluetooth-connected car speakers. My mom immediately mourned the lack of a CD player because much like me, she is deeply nostalgic and attached to everything, but I didn’t think twice about it with the convenience of a fancy little screen in our used car. It felt bougie. It felt luxurious. The days we played CDs in that old Toyota surreptitiously slipped my mind.
Then one day I woke up with an old melody stuck in my head and asked my mom about it, who also did not remember the name of the song despite me singing the first verse over and over again in our living room. With no trail of the song online and no CD player in my laptop or our car, the song was nowhere to be found. Just another memory of my life before moving to the United States in a blurred mosaic of dreamlike images that were never clear enough to make out. I looked at the stack of CDs in the rack built into the TV mount that had been in the living room my whole life. I looked at the neverending VHS tapes tucked away under the TV in that same piece of furniture. I glanced over at the countless cassette tapes collecting dust with artists only my late father would remember that occupy a fifth of the space he would in another timeline where he saw me beyond my toddlerhood. It was at that moment everything compressed in my chest. There is a lot of beauty in the ephemeral nature of music and media art. I for one, am always grasping to never let things disappear. It’s a difficult fight for us to win with evolving technologies.
Yet, this tweet I encountered recently shook me from that trance of grief. Piracy IS preservation and a valid form of archivism. One of the essays I wrote in college that meant the most to me was an in-depth analysis of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (more commonly known as CONAIE) Pachakutik movement as part of my Latin American resistance movements class for my minor. I remember being at my professor’s office hours on the verge of tears of stress because academic literature sources surrounding indigenous Ecuadorian history are scarce online. I opted to go against the grain and write my report on an Ecuadorian movement because it was important to me to relate my studies to my culture, and while it would’ve been easier to pick a movement we studied in class such as the Zapatista uprising, I felt underrepresented in my family’s history never being part of the academic canon. Luckily my professor had a lot of empathy for me and scanned chapters from a book only he had access to as an educator. This paper would not have been made possible if not for digital libraries like the Internet Archive. What some may view as “piracy” saved my final grade in this course and gave me the ability to understand more about my cultural history as a microcosm in the greater picture of Latin American resistance. We can thank someone’s cousin, somebody’s uncle, even DJs on the internet for being timekeepers and archivists of our sociocultural landscape that allow us to sit with these mirages of time just a bit longer. Through this work, everything loved by someone forgotten in a corner can be dusted off and given a second life in the most unassuming ways.
Did the digital age kill romance? Romcoms, recessions, & romanticizing offline life ✶
I’ve been in a big romantic comedy kick this year as part of my healing praxis (breaking in my first TV in years by watching feel-good romcoms for dinner). I felt spoiled growing up in the golden age of romantic comedies in the early 2000s. Love was a spectacle easily accessible at my nearest Blockbuster and renting the latest romcom was an event catered with boxed candies. But the genre has since seen a huge decline in presence at both the box office and theaters alike. I always wondered why that was, when did we lose the magic of lighthearted romcoms and where did it go? In perfect timing, I saw a video essay by
on my YouTube home feed titled “Why aren’t romcoms “romantic” anymore?” released just a few days ago where she dives into the history of romantic comedies beginning with 1930s screwball comedies. The early Hollywood screwball comedy was a mirror of the time, as all art is, responding to a demand for lighthearted goofiness and satire following the post-prohibition crash and the great depression increasing divorce rates in the United States. The demand for screwball comedies decreased with the emergence of World War II, as many Hollywood studios then shifted their focal points to fundraise via patriotic propaganda and more serious “selfless” films over “frivolous” comedies.But it wasn’t too long until the demand for romantic escapism followed. The 1950s saw the birth of technicolor films and romantic comedies as we know them. It was evident that people wanted a more grounded sense of escapism post-war, with melodramatic romcoms and musicals taking center stage. It also saw a more serious shift in tone to the romantic comedy plot structure which, in contrast to screwball comedies, took love very seriously. This comfort genre saw its peak in the ’90s and early 2000s with around 15-25 romcoms hitting theaters per year from 2004-2010 and raises the question of why the genre fell off.
The short answer is fuck Marvel the modern go big or go home approach to filmmaking where Hollywood centers revenue. With inflation adjusting the average movie budget by thousands of dollars and streaming platforms competing against Hollywood, mid-budget feel-good romcoms lost momentum in the eyes of studios, opting for more grandiose productions that were bound to succeed in the box office, like superhero films. So in a way, money & streaming services killed the romantic comedy, but many would argue that so did technology.
English professor Tommy Jenkins states in an article on Technician Online that many beloved tropes in romantic comedies just cannot exist with modern technology. Surely it’s hard to chase your ex into their airport terminal gate right before boarding post 9/11 security processes (unless you got money like Nick Young from Crazy Rich Asians), nor does social media leave any air of mystery of our whereabouts for an estranged lover to chase you all through the country to profess their love. In a world where anyone can be just a find my iPhone search away, the magic of miscommunication that often lined the plots of romantic comedies flatline. Many people online also reflect the sentiments of yearning for “meet-cutes”, the film trope of charming first encounters between strangers that lead to a relationship, in real life. The popularity of online dating services and loss of third spaces (not to mention, rational pandemic anxiety) has influenced why it’s hard to write spontaneous love stories that hold a flame to those of the 90’s set in a simpler society with more entertaining stories. While everything IS romantic, there are also a lot of barriers that well…kill the romance and mystique of modern dating.
Maybe we weren’t meant to be so hyper-visible, broadcasting our every move to a consistent audience. Maybe the missing puzzle piece in all of this is genuine connection. It’s evident in the growing demand for grounded optimism through romantic comedies and efforts to bring back third spaces. The fear of broadcasted failure and imposed rules on what talking stages and relationships should model and present kill romance because they kill vulnerability, a driving force in what allows this magic to flourish.
I found it very peculiar in watching the film Anyone But You that such a small presence of cell phones and social media existed in the running hour and 44 minutes. Somehow, the movie allows for two people to almost hook up, fallout, and meet again at a sibling’s destination wedding candidly. This made me laugh as someone from Miami because rarely do people hook up and fallout without extensive FBI-level research conducted on the forsaken situationship these days, but in the Anyone But You universe it is possible! They can fall into the ocean (twice!) and never worry about retrieving their cell phones from the waves. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I ever saw Sydney Sweeney even carry a purse in this film -all the more freeing. This Shakespearean, screwball-reminiscent romcom is not entirely the most realistic film, but funny and perfectly invokes the escapism and grounded optimism that is so coveted today. Maybe we’ll see a rise in screwball-esque comedies with this economic crash that has been boiling under the surface, the fact is romcoms are slowly making a comeback and it might be due to collective calls to, as my mom would tell me as a teenager, get off that damn phone.
analog girls in the digital world ✶⋆.˚꩜ ˙⋆✶
In my last letter, I lightly grazed over the Pluto in Capricorn generation leading a cultural shift in returning to an offline world through outdated technology. We can see it in the wild rise of digital cameras, the subtle resurgence of the CD player with marketing strategies of Korean girl group Aespa (which in my own future rollout I will try to tap into TRUST🤞🏽), and even flip phones creeping into the mainstream. There is a lingering lust in the air for simpler times. Romantic comedies are making a comeback, communities around DIY hobbies such as crochet/snail mail/junk journaling are flourishing online, and of course, white girls are embarking on their yearly canvassing to advocate how Gilmore Girls is a television gem for its nostalgic portraiture of small-town life and comfort in depictions of real community in ways we seldom see today.
It’s difficult to ignore there is an insatiable need for a sense of pre-pandemic normality among folks, whether they yearn for a time when global climate/health disasters and political turmoil were not hyper-visible the way they are now (side eye, please refer to Ismatu’s writing here) or long for childhoods and goals brought to a screeching halt. While this blissful ignorance is not sustainable or healthy, as we continue in the fourth year of being in the pandemic, it continues to be mirrored in the media we consume for comfort through fashion trend cycles, increased efforts in pop music production, and movies. There is no perfect approach to the ways we cope through times that feel isolating and disappointing, as there is no return to societal norms before cell phones and there is no future without sustainable practices to protect the earth we live on, but we always have balance.
While we can’t stop the machine from rolling out technologies that do nothing but harm, there is always personal advocacy in what we choose to support and ignore. In my life, it looks like balancing my need to maintain visibility and online presence as it’s my main source of connection as of recent while also being very real with myself and respecting my limits + relying on the relationships in my life to find the optimistic grounding I seek. It looks like using technology to artistically put myself out there while acknowledging algorithmic reach is not a merit scale. It’s digesting the information we learn of global resistance movements to move responsibly at the heart of the American empire while learning to self-regulate our nervous systems and touch grass so that we can mobilize in the long run. This is not an essay advocating for complete disengagement from advancing technologies nor an essay trying to fight against time to immortalize every artifact with a digital footprint. Instead, this is an invitation to investigate the ways we depend on the digital spheres too much and observe where technological advancement for good is threatened by companies when they suddenly threaten revenue.
I am finding the romance in the mundane and simultaneously lifting myself in the moments I lose faith when the world continues to spin despite all the horrors. We need each other now more than ever and will only get through it together –however, that may look like, at a virtual gathering or at the club (hopefully masked, it’s never too late to do so!) If you made it to the end, let me know if you’ve been enjoying any Solarpunk literature, what song uplifts you every time you listen to it, or what movie you think is the best romcom of all time (hehe.) I hope you all have a beautiful rest of your Virgo season and a soft transition into the upcoming lunar eclipse in Pisces with lots of protection. *ੈ✩‧₊˚
Yours in resistance and rapture.
Love,
Neptunemuse ✨🌺
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