Andrew McCluskey

Then, one day, Facebook snapped its fingers like Thanos and much of that dependable reach evaporated into ash. No longer would every one of your Page followers see every one of your posts. Facebook did what central banks do to combat inflation and raised interest rates on borrowing attention from the News Feed.

Music has no purpose, it merely brings together people’s dreams, fragilities, licentiousness and weirdness. It can bring masses of people together through that. As much as those in the underground find each other, so do the Swifties and The ARMY. Scale, here, doesn’t stop the human capacity of bonding through music and the exchange of identity.

For these communities, hearing a generative model spit out a synthetic gospel track or an AI-generated country twang is not just an artistic affront, it can feel like outright blasphemy, proof that tech elites would rather manufacture culture than nurture it.

Sharing tastes forges social bonds between people (i.e. bridges), while discrepancies in taste create barriers between people (i.e. fences).