On Using the Machine

The Lansing State Journal used to run listings. Not just concert listings — the full texture of what was happening in this city on any given week. Behind that was a staff: reporters, editors, photographers, designers who understood that getting it right was the job, and did that job at volume, under deadline, every day. People who knew the difference between what was true and what was almost true. Your friends, your neighbors, people who knew this city’s neighborhoods, institutions, and rhythms the way you only know a place after years of paying close attention to it.

That kind of knowledge doesn’t transfer when the building empties out. It leaves with the people. The LSJ still publishes, but the presses that used to run on the first floor and later on the west side are long gone — the downtown building sits empty now, the paper operating out of a third-floor office just around the corner. The people there today are tenacious, idealistic, and doing serious work against a tide that was past the point of turning before most people noticed it was rising.

City Pulse is still standing too, doing more than most people realize on a fraction of the resources it deserves. Good journalists are still in this city. The craft didn’t die. It got defunded.

That defunding didn’t happen because of AI. It happened because Google and Facebook engineered a more efficient way to extract the advertising revenue that had sustained local journalism for a century, and redirected it into their own accounts. The money left. The staff followed. The gap that created — in coverage, in institutional knowledge, in the simple daily work of telling a community what’s happening inside it — has been there for years, long before anyone was having a serious conversation about artificial intelligence.

I mention this because the honest story about why AI is part of this project starts there. With an absence. Not an enthusiasm.

Here’s what I actually think about AI, as plainly as I can put it:

It’s a tool with an enormous shadow. The same technology that helps one person maintain a local music site is eliminating jobs, concentrating wealth, and being deployed by the same class of people who hollowed out local journalism in the first place; this time moving faster and deeper into the economy. The fact that I find it useful doesn’t mean I think the way it’s being developed and rolled out is good. Those are separate questions.

The Luddites understood this distinction better than their reputation suggests. They weren’t afraid of machines. They were specific: they objected to machines being used, without their consent or participation, to eliminate skilled work and funnel the proceeds to people who did none of it.

They lost. But they weren’t wrong about what was happening.

The Craftsmen — Morris, Ruskin, the people whose thinking eventually shaped the Bauhaus — tried something different. Not removal of the technology, but insistence that it serve human ends rather than replace them. That beauty and function weren’t luxuries. That ordinary people deserved well-made things. That argument lost too, not suppressed like the Luddites, but absorbed. The vocabulary survived; the ethics didn’t. ‘Handcrafted’ now appears on mass-produced beer.

The argument wasn’t wrong. It just got eaten by the thing it was arguing against.

This fight is not new. The impulse to accumulate surplus, concentrate it, and call the result progress has been the dominant story of the last few centuries — but not, it turns out, for most of human history. David Graeber and David Wengrow brought decades of thinking to that argument in The Dawn of Everything, and their thesis is unsettling in the best way: the arrangement we treat as inevitable is actually a choice. It gets made, usually, by the people making the profit.

But the Luddites and the Craftsmen aren’t the only story worth telling here.

In 1517, Martin Luther nailed a document to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. He wasn’t the first person to challenge the Church’s authority, and he wasn’t the last. What made Luther different wasn’t the argument — it was the press. Within weeks, his 95 theses had spread across Germany. Within months, across Europe. Ideas that would have stayed local, absorbed and suppressed like the ones before, became something the Church couldn’t contain. Not because Luther was louder, but because Gutenberg had built a machine sixty years earlier that gave those ideas velocity.

The printing press didn’t cause the Reformation. It didn’t cause the Scientific Revolution, or the Enlightenment. The ideas were already there. Aristarchus of Samos proposed a heliocentric solar system in 280 BC — nearly eighteen hundred years before Copernicus. Copernicus knew this, because the idea had survived in manuscript copies held by scholars and monasteries, accessible to a tiny literate elite. Copernicus himself cited Aristarchus in his original manuscript, but crossed out the reference before publication.

Before the press, that’s how ideas lived or died — by whether the institutions that controlled manuscripts chose to copy them, share them, or let them quietly disappear. The press didn’t make suppression impossible, but it made it visible and expensive. You could still try to bury an idea — the Church put Galileo under house arrest, banned books, and burned texts — but you had to do it loudly, at scale, in ways that often had the opposite of the intended effect. The economics of controlling what people knew had permanently changed.

That’s the question worth asking about every communication technology since: not whether it makes ideas free, but who controls the economics of how they travel, and in whose interest.

The web is 35 years old this year. The printing press is pushing 600. We are, genuinely, at the beginning of something we don’t have the distance to see clearly yet. AI isn’t the printing press — but I think it is a plausible candidate for that category of thing: a technology that changes not just how we make objects or move goods, but how ideas travel, how knowledge is produced and accessed, and who gets to participate in that production. The press didn’t just print books. It broke the monopoly on who got to shape what people know. The question with AI is whether it breaks that monopoly further — or hands it to someone new.

I don’t have a clean resolution. I use the tool. I think carefully about how. Every piece of information AI helps surface gets read by a person before it goes anywhere. Every editorial call is made by a human. The technology makes the collecting possible — pulling from venue sites, Facebook events, Instagram posts, and band pages scattered across a dozen platforms — but it doesn’t decide what matters. That part stays with me.

Whether that’s enough, I genuinely don’t know. What I do know is that the question of what AI is for — who it serves, who decides, whether the people most affected by it have any voice in those decisions — is the same question the Luddites were asking in 1811. It’s the same one the Bauhaus was asking in 1919. It usually gets answered by whoever moves first and accumulates the most.

It doesn’t have to.

This site is a small attempt at a different answer. Local. Specific. Accountable to the musicians and venues it covers, not to engagement metrics or investor returns. Using the technology to surface what matters to actual people in an actual place, and keeping a human in every loop that matters.

If you want to talk about any of this, come find me. I’m usually at a show somewhere in town. I’m not hard to find. You just have to leave the house.