Who Are You?

I barely know you, Universal Music Group. My friends also can’t decipher “UMG” without a search.

Here’s something about us, since you haven’t bothered asking:

You companies are making models of us from Our Data, and Our Metadata. You Pay Us Nothing for it.

I understand where you came from and why, UMG, but Who Are You? Where’d your Artists learn those Tunes?

WDYN?

You have needs that are not being met by those around you. Just look anywhere. You may even think that’s normal.

Every single one of Us is spied upon by powers who can call National Security their Flag. Centralization is their life hack. This is not upcoming, because it is fully finished. Just look anywhere. You may even think it’s normal.

You, Actual People, your companies and governments cannot hear you. They circumvent you, and routinely. They abdicate their community tools to centralized Discord communities and then strive to bottle them there.

Polling is broken, even when companies and their corporate agents pose us questions.

I want to see a culture of fewer statistics, less interference and “context” and instead I want to see A Lot More Raw Fucking Data.

We have no representation, let alone in This Country’s government, which is shut down, having willingly killed itself on orders from the Democratic Party (whatever that is). It’s not coming back.

There are So Many tapping the lines that your safety and security is not possible, and your fellows all shrug that it’s Normal.

Your children are hired by Proto-AI corporations calling themselves “people” in some laws. It is a Demented Claim on Personhood, and they have inhaled Our Data and Our Metadata and have literally called it their own from the start. They’ve been selling us a lie that money is The Same as our speech and must eclipse it.

Having destroyed Customer Service with glee and bonuses, they now ask us to talk to their cousin once removed: Voila their unsupervised LLM, their idiot doorman with no blame for anything said or not said, and no Actual Person watching what it does to us.

Corporate Designed Ignorance is a weapon being wielded against us always. Property managers, dealerships, parking meters, phones, their networks, The Nation Of Israel, truly anybody has Your Data and they call it theirs.

We need to name value and where it is missing in our lives. We need to learn how to acquire value without corporate permission. Rent is broken. Housing is broken. Transportation is broken. Energy is broken. The list goes on.

Being human, do we realize that we possess the power to speak without first signing a Privacy Policy?

Universal Music Group

You are something else. You are laying claim to a medium You Cannot Own. We are sorry that computers heard your clients, like we already did.

AI is all of us, and soon data training will require completely new methods.

We are at Terminal Velocity on our approach to a future where they make us pay royalties just to hear music they wouldn’t have published in the first place. They want to be paid for the work of those they don’t represent, in addition to those they do.

The first Artist who dips their toe into tolerable training will draw the raised eyebrow of another who thinks they really did it first, and that’s literally got a dollar figure on it now.

Which is it? Does Our Data have intrinsic value, or none?

We have become too socially docile to defend ourselves, and no one represents us, though UMG claims to represent Our Data.

Our realtime data and locations are watched. How are you using your Real Time?

Visit Fort Collins

Actual People, Want To Be Friends?

We in Fort Collins are afflicted with the same Placer Labs snitch in our palms as you. The Flock cameras infest our streets. Verra Mobility is in our lines and spying. There are more watching than just these.

Fort Collins was ranked top of all desirable places to be, but we’re sick like you too.

At the Visit Fort Collins center, we are busy meeting entrepreneurs. Let them watch.

Would that more would see.

Giantism

Giantism Companies can index or not index anything they want, and this is not a political statement. They splash audience on those idol YouTubers the way my last startup job fawned for FAANGs(QAI+? Is this Comedy?) and couldn’t promote from within. They bring Their Friends.

I am tired of Giantism Companies (and the little ones which aspire) who chase the dollar as the only metric of anything.

They know when you’re home, and they’re doing their best to watch us when we’re not. Without us and Our Data, they could not exist. Where is our representation at all here? Without Our Data, they are literally nothing, and it’s by their own definitions scrawled on masturbatory policy documents.

Why haven’t they asked for our policy? At what point are we supposedly being consulted at all?

Hi, Scrapers Of Us; Hi, Placer Labs; You should be paying ME. When you train those models to think like us and do what we do, isn’t the crucial ingredient Us?

Scrawled on a disclaimer, you say here that we must opt out of your Marketplace of integrations.

I rhetorically dare you to say that again.

I don’t want to know what you need, Giantism abominations. You talk about that too often, and we’re not reading your Policies anyway tbh. You’re still not asking for ours.

Udio

I am a volunteer member of the board of directors for Fort Collins Public Media. Separately, I was flattered to be part of Udio’s community.

I intended to teach people who had the “handicap” of not being able to sing or use DAWs or afford hardware to do the digital pottery sculpting process without that affliction.

There was still a gap for normies, but Udio kept putting out the call for organic marketing.

I swing harder than most; I had been preparing a public production but the release options were not plentiful. I’ve had a monetized YouTube channel before but there are so many failure modes for a “show” that I know that creators stop producing because of external pressures.

ANTIBODY, the code repository, is yours if you want it. Copy it, delete me and write for yourself. Put images and audio and video and whatever you can fit on Cloudflare, including their arbitrary global file system.

What I needed was to help you do you, even if it’s Udi-oo.

The show I planned, as a concept, is gone because Udio can’t tell a sister anything at all before it’s too late to matter out here. The sneak-attack destruction is successful, of the Users (“You-sers”), the Customers (“People”), the actual humans paying you our money or being granted subscription for your own professed list of benefits to us and you.

The overnight obliteration of Paying People is not chill, and I’m tired of hearing an equivocation that It’s Legal. That’s what AT&T says, too. Stop talking like a Muppet, and we’ll stop reaching up your ass like one. The cause and effect is really weird here, but we get it: Nobody’s been in this position before.

We neither! But we’re inventing.

Please Stand By.

In-Person

At the Visit Fort Collins center mixer event on November 3rd, there was a slow slideshow display on the wall, featuring a QR code packed with a lot more metadata than is even usual.

QR holds URLs mostly, and that size often means there’s a lot of tracking data in there, even just another domain it’s forwarding to. Maybe it’s just a really poorly chosen long url. There were upwards of 16 anchor points inside it to support its size, but I knew the QR wasn’t “full”.

QR can hold anything because it looks like anything, a bunch of squares arranged just so.

It was a very potent object lesson for me to point at all night, and I had a Lucky Seventh sense to check the rotating slideshow at just the right time, every time, to cue it like it was choreographed.

What Else can you put in there?

Companies weaponize centralization. Look anywhere. They don’t understand decentralization, but You must.

Stop pointing QR at IP space.

It’s the floppy disk era.

This is Fort Collins Civic Node: ANTIBODY and we declare plainly that you other nodes must know and help your own People.

We’ll see you when we see you.

Take Heart.

You can reach Autumn Ryan to be heard about this subject at [email protected]. Do not transmit sensitive or private information if it’s unsuitable for others to have.