Ep44 -- Of Mind Sounds

 Have you ever experienced the phenomenon of humming a tune kind of in your head to a song, without realizing it at all, and then when you finally consciously notice what song it is, you realize that the lyrics or the theme or something about the song speaks to exactly what's been occupying your conscious mind at that time?  Well, this happened to me in a funny way when I was visiting my son at college a few weeks ago. It was Dad's Weekend for his fraternity, so of course we were playing some drinking games. One of the games, which I've never played before -- and, full disclosure, I've played a lot of drinking games over the years -- is called Rage Cage. It's a game where the players all sit around a table and you have to bounce a ping pong ball into a cup and pass it along to the next person. And there are two cups going around and if you're too slow and keep missing and the other cup catches up to you, you have to drink.  By the way, total aside, have you ever noticed at the supermarket now, there are often ping pong balls for sale in the beer section? When I first saw that a few years ago, I was like, why are there ping pong balls near the oh, right, of course. Okay, back to Dad's Weekend. The next day after playing Rage Cage, we went and played paintball because, of course we did. And the whole time I had this riff playing over and over in my head. It was like, Ba Ba Ba Ba Bah Ba, Ba Ba Ba Bah Ba, Ba Ba Ba Ba Bah Ba, Ba Ba Ba Bah Ba.

And, I didn't notice it, but it's a cool riff. And then I finally realized it was this song.

[SONG CLIP] 

And the name of that song for all of you, non J. Geils Band fans out there is "Rage in the Cage".  Pretty cool, huh? The way our brains work when we're not really paying attention.  Now since election day, I've had something running over and over in my head. It's not a melody or a lyric, but it's a line from a movie and it has forced me to interrogate and reevaluate my understanding of and attitude toward so many things that, looking back with fresh eyes, now seemed to inevitably lead to the result of November 5th, 2024.  To find out what line it is and how it has affected my thinking, so thoroughly,  stay tuned.

I'm Craig Boreth, and this is The Great Ungaslighting, a podcast about how we all get conned into accepting a manmade culture that's out of sync with our human nature and how we can fight back and put the kind back into humankind. 

But first, a word about a sponsor. 

This week's episode of The Great Ungaslighting is not brought to you by publishing giant HarperCollins, which you may or may not know is owned by NewsCorp, which I assume you do know is owned by good old Rupert Murdoch and his lovely family.  HarperCollins has been in the news lately because they're in a bit of a fight with AI companies over the use of their copyrighted material to train AI models. And in this fight, it looks as though you have the AI tech companies on one side and the creative artists, as well as publishing company ownership on the other side. But looks can be deceiving.  Even otherwise appropriately discerning news outlets like The Guardian ran an article back in December, noting "the unlikely Alliance of billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and a panoply of leading artists, including the radio head singer, Tom York, the actors, Kevin Bacon and Julianne Moore and the author Kazuo Ishiguro." But I'd suggest that those artists, and all of us really, carefully heed the advice of SciFi writer Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who said, "Just because you're on their side doesn't mean they're on your side." 

And as we've been finding out over the past several weeks, the Murdochs and HarperCollins are definitely not on the side of their writers and artists. The simple truth is that the only issue the Murdochs, the owners of Penguin Random House, the CEO of TimeWarner, and pretty much every other media corporation owner has with AI companies is not that they're using copyrighted material to train AI models, it's that they're not sufficiently compensating those owners for the use of that material.  And lately, we've been seeing evidence that the Murdochs have gotten a good enough deal. And they've begun presenting their authors with a take-it-or-don't-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-ass offers to give away the rights to their work to AI companies.  Children's book author, Daniel Kibblesmith recently posted on Bluesky that he was offered $2,500 for permission to use one of his books to train an AI model.  And the scam of it, the gaslighting nature of the deal is right there out in the open, in the offer presented to authors. The $2,500 per title is purportedly for a three-year license. Oh, okay. So maybe it's not such a terrible deal. 2,500 bucks every three years. At least it's something. But is it? Now, I don't know a whole lot beyond the basics of how AI actually works. But one thing I do know is that once you've trained a model on the contents of a book, and that model has been used countless times based on that content, it's impossible to then extract that content from the model. I mean, even if you were to untrain it on the specific words of the original book after three years, the model has evolved over time based on the original book. And there's no way to find and delete all of the downstream effects of the original text. 

It feels like the HarperCollins case is the kind of thing we're going to be seeing a lot of in the coming years as billionaire oligarchs dismantle public institutions and sell off their services cheap to private entities. All in the name of helping regular folks like us.  And it seems inevitable that there will be a lot of completely predictable pain and misery before enough of us regular folks realize that just because we're on their side, doesn't mean they're on our side.  Amen, Teresa Nielsen Hayden. Amen. 

And we're back. 

As I mentioned at the top, I've had this line in my head since election day. It's from the movie Swimming to Cambodia, which if you're not familiar with it, is this quite amazing one-man show by Spalding Gray, mostly about his time in Thailand during the filming of the movie The Killing Fields, in which he had a small part.  At one point, he talks about how he loves to travel by train because of the people he meets in the cafe car who tell him their secrets like it's one big rolling confessional. How one time on the way from New York to Chicago, he met this Naval officer stationed in Philadelphia who tells him after several rum and Cokes that his job is to be chained underground in a waterproof chamber next to a green button, just waiting for the order to fire nuclear missiles at the Russians.  He says he won't feel guilty for potentially destroying the world because he says with great pride, he has been properly brainwashed.  Eventually, he explains that the Russians want to take over the world and the only way that Spalding can do his little talking cure monologues is because the country is protected by people like him.  And for a second there, Spalding has a revelation and it leads to this line that I've had running through my head for a month now. 

"Like any good liberal I should question eeeeeeeeevvvvverything."

And so that's what I've been doing with regard to the 2024 election. Not so much questioning how the Harris campaign was run, though god knows there's plenty to question, but more questioning how I saw things during the campaign and during the months and years leading up to the campaign, and questioning why I thought about or interpreted things a certain way and how I could have thought about them differently.  And my conclusion is that had I and people of my political inclination, and the political leaders who purport to represent our interests,  done that kind of questioning at the time, the campaign probably would have played out very differently.  And may, just may have resulted in a different outcome.  

So, let me give you an example of what I'm talking about.  Inflation.  Obviously an important factor in people's interpretations of how the economy was doing over the past few years and how politicians were rated on their handling of the economy.  Now for me, I saw inflation. I knew it was happening. I read about it, heard about it. But I can't say that I really felt it viscerally. I mean, I shop carefully and I look for good value and I don't want to get ripped off. But when I'm in line at the grocery store, I don't really pay too close attention to the total bill for all the groceries. Why? Because I know my family can afford it. Even with the inflation rate topping 9% as it did in 2022, I noticed the higher prices, but I didn't really feel them. I never really experienced what I call the Mary Richards shrug.  For those of you of a certain age, we remember during the opening of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, although, I just got to say, I saw this in reruns, so I'm not that old. There's this moment where Mary is in the supermarket and she looks at the price of something and just tosses it into the cart with this look of utter resignation. I never felt that.  For me, and I think for a lot of people fortunate enough to be financially secure in recent years, we paid attention to inflation mostly because of the effect it would have on interest rates and on the political fortunes of the incumbent party. So,  as inflation rates came down and eventually the fed cut interest rates, we thought that's a victory, a problem solved that will recede into the past with happy days here again.  

But that's not how a lot of people felt about the inflation narrative. Lots of people  really felt that 9% increase in prices over the year before. And after another year went by and inflation was only 3% over the year before, that meant 3% on top of the 9% of the previous year.  Still way high, just going up from there at a little slower rate. So while I'm feeling the decrease in inflation as an improvement, lots of other people feel it as just more pain on top of the previous pain. And it sure as hell doesn't feel like a relief that the pain is increasing at a slower rate than it was before. It's just more pain.  

On a related note, it has become clear that there was a lot of price gouging going on during the recent inflationary period. Lots of companies had been reporting record profits over the past couple years. So clearly some of their price increases were not due just to increased expenses.  And it has been calculated that a full quarter, 25% of rent increases over the past year or so were due to price fixing among big corporate landlords, 25%.  Now I knew of this because I was reading obsessively about it. Sometimes for this podcast, but most of the time, because it's just what I do. And I knew that one political party was more likely to address that unfairness moving forward than the other. Obviously not guaranteed to do so, but more likely.  And vice president Harris promised to address those issues if elected and I was reasonably certain, she would at least try to do something about it. Would she succeed? Maybe, maybe not. But there would be people in her administration who would really try.  Okay. So what about people who feel those increased prices and that skyrocketing rent all day, every day, without the time or interest to dig into the weeds about what's causing it and what might be done to help them?  They see a candidate for president who was vice president for four years, who is the current vice president. And what has she actually done to fight for them? As far as they can see and feel, absolutely nothing. And they're not wrong to feel that way. Did she propose and fight for price caps, profit caps, or cash payments to families to help cover grocery bills? Of course, lots of people will say, well, she couldn't do that. It's not in her role as vice-president, it's heavy handed government, it's not possible and so on and so on. And that's exactly the point. From the perspective of the people who are suffering, all that sounds like just more bullshit excuses to do nothing.   

And when you turn around during a campaign and say, you're going to end price gouging,  the absolutely rational, reasonable reaction from people who are suffering is: bullshit. You haven't done it yet. You haven't even tried. Why should we believe you when you say you really care and want to help, and will do something about it in the future?  If you really want to help, like you claim to, then help. It's pretty simple.  

And finally,  I questioned my reaction when I'd hear about undecided voters in the days leading up to the election. Undecided? How could anyone be undecided? How could anyone be that ignorant or clueless about what's going on? Well, guess what? They were undecided. Actual real people didn't know which way to vote. And what difference does it make why?  Maybe they just had so much shit going on in their lives, and couldn't remember a time when they didn't have so much shit going on, and couldn't possibly imagine a day when they might have less shit going on, that whoever happens to be president of the United States doesn't really matter all that much to them.  Might they have ultimately voted against their own interests? Maybe. Did the Biden administration do things that will actually improve their lives and protect their interests? I think it did. But do I have any right to look down on those people and criticize their indecision?  No. If the politicians that I support didn't earn their vote either through their leadership or through their campaign, that's on the politicians. Find a way to do better. Go talk to those people today and tomorrow and every day thereafter until the next election day. Do things that improve their lives in ways that they can see and feel and causes them to feel hopeful about the future.  Like for example, not infrastructure. Okay, don't get me wrong. What Biden got done on infrastructure was a big deal and he should get credit for it. But,  infrastructure improvements take a long time to happen. And when they're done, they're pretty much invisible. I mean let's face it, infrastructure is working well when you don't notice it. So basing your campaign on something that hasn't actually happened yet, and that people won't notice even when it does happen, isn't probably the best strategy.  

So what's the big takeaway this week? I think it's that questioning everything also means questioning some of the fundamental themes of this podcast. Like David Foster Wallace has graduation speech, "This is Water". Yes, there are certain components of our reality that are so fundamental, so normal to us that we don't even notice them. They're like the water we're swimming around in.  And if this election has taught us anything, it's that we're not all swimming around in the same water.  But regardless of their differences, we all experience our own water in the same way. It's our normal, regardless of how it might appear to someone in the next pond over.  So, if you want to improve someone's life, especially someone in another pond, you actually have to improve their water, their reality. You can't just tell them they're experiencing their reality wrong.  

Well, that's it for this week.  If you liked this episode, please share it with anyone you think might also enjoy it. And until next time,  be kind to yourself, cut each other, some slack, and use your damn turn signal.