The man I think of as “The Godfather of New Wave”, David Byrne, wrote a very interesting and thought-provoking op ed piece for The Guardian’s website that delved deep into the topic of the future of the music (and other creative) businesses in the era where everyone gets everything by streaming it over the Internet.

He makes a lot of good points about how the music business has once more figured out a way to keep most of the money themselves and stiff the artists by paying them a tiny fraction of the dough. A world where Daft Punk can have a massive hit with Get Lucky^[1] and only make around $26K from it from Spotify just plain does not make sense to most people. We inherently assume that Spotify made one hell of a lot more money than that from the song.

But the thing is, we don’t actually know that. With any subscription-based streaming service, whether it’s Netflix or Spotify or even satellite radio, it is impossible to determine exactly how much money the parent company is making off of any one piece of streaming media. They make their money by convincing people to subscribe. Certainly, having all the latest and greatest stuff helps with that. But did a lot of people sign up to Spotify solely to hear Get Lucky? Probably not, considering you could listen to it free on YouTube any time you like.

It’s kind of like a supermarket. Most of the time, people shop at a supermarket because it has everything they want, not because it has one product they really like.

So it’s impossible to know how much money Spotify made from Get Lucky, or any other song. The fact that they pay artists based on how many times the song is streamed is actually sort of a leap of faith on their part. They know that paying per stream is the only way to properly incentivize the artists. But from their point of view, their business is based on having everything, not any one thing.

As for the fact that a massive amount goes to the rights holders (otherwise known as the record labels), that was sadly inevitable. Copyright law being what it is today, the only way to have a legitimate business of any scale that had the music people wanted was to give the rights holders their cut. Otherwise, the big dogs would have crushed Spotify with lawsuits and nobody would be getting the service in the first place.

This will end soon, though. The new hotness of today does not need a record label for nearly anything. A brash young band can find an audience directly through the Internet, and as time goes by, the value of what the record companies own will diminish as new music replaces the old, and the majority of music will be solely in the hands of those who actually made it.

This leads me to my next point, which is that while being a struggling young band or artist pays, at best, no more than it always has, the costs of that band or artist have never been lower. What used to take the kind of money that only big record labels had is now virtually free. People record albums on their MacBook that sound as good or better than albums that required millions of dollars and an army of technicians. Merchandise that used to require a significant up front investment can now be made available for nothing or next to nothing via sites like Cafe Press. Promotion that used to required posters, media reps, massive ad buys, and fleets of Fleet street brown-nosers now can be had for the zero cost of putting up a Tumblr. And distribution? Well, that’s what services like Spotify are for.

So sure, no artist(s) will make a living off Spotify any time soon. But there are plenty of other ways to make money from your music, and while it may be that no one of them pays all that much, if you combine enough of them together, you are actually making a lot more than indie bands used to make, and with virtually no overhead and no need to even tour.

This leads me to my last point, which is : just exactly how important to art is it that people be able to make a living at it? Sure, we all dream of devoting our lives to our art and not having to subject ourselves to the rough and tumble callous world of dead end day jobs any more, but do we really think that if there was no money, there would be no art?

Of course not. Lots of wonderful art has been made by people who were working day jobs or even not working at all and just starving in a garret somewhere. These people had no idea if their art would ever pay them one red dime, and yet they kept making it because the making of art is something artists simply feel compelled to do.

The money comes later, if at all.

So even if the towering financial edifice of the music industry came tumbling down and it became nearly impossible to make a living as a musician, people would still make music and share it with others online and the art would, if anything, become a lot more pure because nobody would be compelled to turn out whatever commercial crap sells just to pay the bills.

If no art can pay the bills, then we are all free to do whatever the hell we want with out art.

I don’t think that is what is going to happen. I have faith that the combination of art and capitalism will prove creative enough to find ways to make money off of whatever it is people like and will be forced, eventually, to give artists a larger share of the action in the process.

After all, right now, someone could set up a competitor to Spotify that pays artists twice and much, and there would be a trong incentive to upload yourself there too.

So relax, folks. The music industry, as well as all other creative industries, might contract for now but there is no danger of them disappearing. The dinosaurs of the previous era know their time on Earth is limited and that is why they cling to the assets they have so fiercely. They know that their roles as gate-keepers and risk-takers will soon be written out of the script, and the future will belong to the smaller, fleeter, hardier mammals of the direct connection between art consumers and art producers.

I, personally, can’t wait.

That’s all from me for today, folks. I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.

I have talked about this subject before, but I feel like taking another swing at it tonight.

Rationality is extremely powerful. It is one of the most powerful factors in the extraordinary and unparalleled success of the human species. Our prefrontal cortexes not only allow us to inhibit our instinctual emotional responses and thus give ourselves a chance to choose our actions instead of merely reacting to stimuli, but they also allow us to recognize patterns in our knowledge of the world and make predictions based on that knowledge. This lets us pursue complex non-immediate goals and opens a world of possibilities unavailable to other animals who cannot “think ahead”.

Because of this extraordinary power, there has historically always been the danger of slipping into believing that rational reasoning is all you need and that you can, in a sense, abdicate your humanity in favour of living in the comfort of the understandable, predictable, and sensible world of rationality.

As far back as the ancient Greek philosophers, there was a feeling that one could deduce absolutely everything about the world and the universe via pure logic alone. This, we can assume, was a great comfort for philosophers, who overwhelmingly tend to be the sort who would rather stay home and think than go out there and actually find things out.

But this sort of rationalist escapism is a terrible trap. It is all too easy to be so dazzled by the wizardry of rational inquiry that one forgets that one is still a living, breathing, incarnate human being who has needs, desires, and fears which have nothing to do with rationality and which cannot simply be wished away or eternally suppressed by force of will.

Clearly, a course of action which involves ignoring all the variables that we don’t like to think about cannot be considered rational, and any human being who attempts to walk around with their head entirely in the clouds should not be surprised to find themselves bumping into things and in general doing very poorly at life.

But still, the siren song of rationalist escapism calls. Throughout the ages, thousands of mystics, monks, scholars, and philosophers have sought to escape the messy, petty details of reality and move into the clouds on a permanent basis. This is, in fact, the entire basis of all forms of asceticism. The idea of trying to “purge” yourself of worldly concerns and attain some sort of state of holy purity via self-denial is solely based on rationalist escapism, whether you’re a Babylonian mystic traveling through the desert in search of wisdom, a self-flagellating monk in a cell praying to God, or a hyper-rationalist philosopher looking for a “higher Truth” that supposedly will set you free.

Free of what? Free of humanity, of course. The rational parts of our mind, quite irrationally, think they can escape the ugliness and messiness of things like emotions and bodily needs. This is an illusion created by the fact that pursuing certain lines of reasoning makes us feel as though we are distancing ourselves from “worldly” concerns, and this makes us feel that it must be possible to complete the process and detach entirely.

But what would that even look like? Without emotion, there is no motivation, and without motivation, there is no action. Even the desire to escape via reasoning is, in itself, an emotion. Without the rest of our mental apparatus, the rational parts of our mind are nothing but computers without operators, gathering dust, waiting for someone to turn them back on.

And no matter how certain lines of logical reasoning make you feel (another emotion), you are still the same limited irrational mysterious human being you were before your flight into rationality. There is no true transcendence, no way to overcome all the non-rational parts of your mind and move entirely to some hypothetical “higher plane” that clearly cannot exist. Transcendentalism lies. You cannot escape the game by playing the game.

The only real transcendence is in self-acceptance, not denial. Spiritual wellbeing requires us to recognize, embrace, accept, and integrate all aspects of ourselves into our conception of ourselves. Only then can we feel whole and complete. Only then can we forgive ourselves for being human and move on in life as strong, confident, happy individuals.

Rationalist escapism keeps this from happening. It blocks the necessary growth. It keeps you pursuing its impossible dream of a purely rational existence and denies you the kind of deep, intuitive, subrational truth about yourself that leads to greater happiness and fulfillment in life.

You can analyze yourself all you like, You can come up with all the plausible sounding explanations for your troubles in the world. You can impress as many people with how bright and insightful you are as you want to. But until you are willing to take a hard look at yourself without the protection of rational make-work and comfortable detachment, you will never understand who you truly are under all that rationalist razzle-dazzle and if you don’t know who you really are, you stand absolutely no chance of becoming who you really want to be.

So ignore the siren song of rationalist escapism. Accept that you are a messy, flawed, imperfect human being with petty desires and self instincts, and learn to love yourself for who you really are instead of hating yourself for not being someone you can never, ever be.

Someone who is no longer human. Someone who never makes mistakes, who never does anything stupid, who is only motivated by the highest and noblest of emotions and who never feels confused, vulnerable, lost, embarrassed, un-confident, or lonely.

Nobody escapes being human. If it seems to you like someone has, then you are merely letting your impression of them overwhelm you. They are as human as you or I or that homeless guy down the street who smells like pee.

We all have tiny areas of competency in the vast sea of human endevour. None of us are anywhere close to perfect and there is no amount of thinking that will make it so.

Now put down that rationalist kaleidoscope, and go out there and have fun.

I will talk to all of you nice people again tomorrow.

Government is bureaucracy.

We like to pretend like they are separate things, because that fits better in our hierarchical naked beach ape minds. Goverment, we like to think, is that top layer where our political alphas do their important political stuff that we, the rest of the monkey troupe. need them to do in order to keep us safe.

Bureaucracy, on the other hand, is that annoying stuff with people shuffling pieces of paper around and making you go through a bunch of seemingly needless steps just to get your goddamned driver’s license renewed.

But that’s a false separation. A bogus duality. Government is bureaucracy, bureaucracy is government. Government is made of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is the government. There is no government that is not also bureaucracy.

It is easy – childishly easy – to forget this. We make a game of pretending that the parts of government we like are “the government” and the parts we don’t like are “the bureaucracy”, but you just have to compare maps between two random citizens to realize just how petty and arbitrary a distinction that is.

Every part of government is a part of a vast bureaucracy. The solider in the field, the cop on the beat, the road worker repaving a section of sidewalk, and the middle management interdepartmental liaison are all equally bureaucrats. The fact that they are at the lowest level of the structure, the parts you can actually see working, doesn’t make any of them more important or less a part of government any more that the wheel of the car is more important than the engine because that’s the part we can see and interact with. It is all government.

We Canadians seem to have a somewhat better grip on this than the Americans. After all, they have “truth, justice, and the American Way^[1]” and we have “peace, order, and good government”. We Canadians are, however dimly, aware of the fact that we are the government and the government is us. Whatever level you are dealing with (national, provincial, municipal, school), we remain aware that the bureaucrats we are talking to are fellow Canadians, just like us, and so we feel the same obligation to deal with them in a polite and reasonable fashion as they feel towards us.

Not so down south. Americans are constantly at war with their own anti-authoritarian oppositional/defiant nature, and so they are compelled to divide everything into two camps, Us versus Them. The Little Guy versus the Government. Republicans versus Democrats. Coke versus Pepsi. Great Taste versus Less Filling.

But we are talking about degrees of the same disease. Every democracy struggles with these same false dichotomy these days. The Baby Boom generation cannot stand to be told what to do, no matter how righteous the order. So they reactivate their faded memories of being anti-authoritarian rebels and pretend like it is still Us Versus The System, even though they are the system now and have lost all rights to be considered the underdog.

I guess they never learned to be responsible. Responsibility, after all, restricts freedom and is therefore evil. Nothing else is relevant. Any arguments that they are being irresponsible meet with “LA LA LA, I CAN’T HEAR YOU”, or its equivalent.

So even though they are in power, they are The Man, and they are The System, they still behave like spoiled teenagers for whom everything is optional (or should be) optional, including taxation, law, government, and anything else they don’t like.

Global Warming is going to kill us all? LA LA LA! The wealthy are destroying democracy? Whatever, dude, I’ll be fine so who gives a shit. The police are shooting black people, like, a lot? Nah, we killed racism, everything’s cool. Whatever they have to believe in order to justify doing whatever feels good or is fun to them, they will believe it.

They did it when they were hippies telling themselves having lots of sex and taking lots of drugs will somehow bring about world peace, they did it again when they decided getting jobs and going corporate wasn’t really selling out, they did it a third time when they convinced themselves “greed is good” in the Eighties, and they have done it again now that they are the system and the power but they don’t feel like taking on the responsibility that clearly entails.

Nope, we’re still the put-upon victims of a tyrannical System that only wants to keep us down by doing the worst thing possible in the entire catalog of human sins, making us less rich and more poor. We literally cannot think of anything worse and there is literally no possible justification for it, ever, period.

And this will remain true no matter how many fun wars we vote for. We don’t have to pay for that, The Government does. The Government has unlimited amounts of money from…. I don’t know, somewhere… and therefor can do whatever the hell we want it to do without having to charge us one red cent for it. They only take our money because they are big greedy meanies who like hurting people and hate success!

That’s what we have to believe in order to continue being selfish, callous, and irresponsible, so that’s what we believe.

It’s high time we make these motherfuckers grow up at last. You can’t always have things your way. Some things remain true no matter how much you dislike them. There are lots of things that you still have to do even after your tantrum. There is no Great Depression generation to be the responsible parent and clean up after you any more.

You’re in charge. Behave yourselves. Take a good hard look at reality and deal with life as it is, even all the parts that suggest, however mildly, that sometimes you should not, in fact, be allowed to do whatever the hell you want.

It is high time you admitted to yourself that you are the grownups now, and it’s up to you to clean up your own messes.