On AI anxiety, fake lives, and why getting together feels like part of the answer.
How’s everyone’s giddy up going?
It’s the Year of the Horse, are you galloping yet?
I can’t believe we are practically at the end of summer. We are barely through July but somehow I am already discussing fall projects, and what is coming up next.
But something else is on everyone’s mind and moving just as fast.
At this weeks birthday gatherings, dinners out with friends, walks through the park, the conversation keeps coming back to AI.
How fast it is happening. Whether anyone will have a job. How we’re gonna make money? What happens to art? What will we do with all our time, and how we will survive if robots are really coming for everything.
It is making me nervous. I think it’s making us all more nervous and stressed.
I think about the future for my kid. I think about photography and filmmaking, music and writing, all the things most people I know have spent their lives doing.
I think about the time it takes to develop ideas, and now a machine can spit out a hundred versions of something before I can finish making one thing.
It’s making me feel like its all over, and I can get very down about the point of anything. But it’s also making me see what Friends From New York is and push for it even harder.
Because the less I trust what I am looking at, the more I can at least ask you, someone I know who is real, what they think.
I can sit across from you in real life. I can hear from you, what you are feeling. what you are afraid of, what you are excited about.
I know that you have actually been somewhere, done something, screwed something up, changed your mind, lost something, loved someone, been out late night.
My social media feed now recognizes I am now in a new age bracket.
It keeps sending me beautiful fifty-something yr old women who have apparently transformed their faces, their bodies, with a new routine, a facial exercise, a lifestyle change.
Except it’s becoming easier to tell these women aren’t real!!
They are not my age. They are not anything. They are complete fakes!
They aren’t experiencing hormones and breakups.
Disappointing nights.
No nothin’.
Just straight fakes trying to sell me a new life of being beautiful in this next stage, when they’ve never even had a stage!
And now I’m jealous or looking up to them!? Oy!
Everything is just so FAKE!
Fake faces. Fake photos. Fake people, selling fake transformations in their fake lives.
So it’s really making me want to keep you all way closer.
Its making me understand Friends From New York is group of people where you know who you are dealing with.
A group of people who have histories, references, relationships, memories, and REAL stories behind the things they make and do.
People who came from somewhere, mostly the city, and helped make this place what it is.
People who have made great things, built and started things, fucked things up, and tried again.
People with a point of view, an expertise, because they have actually LIVED through the process of becoming who they are.
That is who I want talking to me.
That is who I want to see and practice my conversing and socializing with.
FFNY gives reasons to share ideas, dance, read, make things, create opportunities for one another.
We need reasons to experience that dopamine hit that comes from seeing someone walk through the door instead just their face on my Iphone Pro Max.
I want to nurture this creative community, keep us connected to one another, keep our relationships and potential partnerships flowing.
I want you to know someone real is behind the photo, the record, the book, the party.
Yes, AI is coming fast and furious with fake shit, so it’s making the things it can’t experience feel even more important.
It will never know what it feels like to walk into a room where you don’t know anyone or you know everyone.
It will never feel nerves before public speaking, interviewing someone for the podcast, or hoping people show up to the party.
It can’t hear a song from twenty years ago and remember exactly who you were dancing with at John Street. It’s never been on a dance floor.
It can generate a song, but it’s never needed that song.
It’s never needed to get those insane feelings out like Walter does with his incredible new Quicksand album that I have on repeat, making me run faster and harder then ever before.
And it can’t know what happens when we get together with our friends.
So I want desperately to keep getting us together, to look each other in the eye, and hope that something wild and crazy, and fun happens.
As I am writing this by hand, a bus is rolling past with the words:
LIVE HERE NOW.
Yes!
Live people!
Not on the couch, sucked into the fucking vortex of your smartphone,
doom-scrolling through doctored up photos, avatars, fake adverts, stupid apps, and lives that aren’t real.
I do not want everything delivered to me through a screen.
I need to know it is actually happening from a real person behind it.
I don’t know exactly what is going to happen, but it’s on everyone’s mind right now, in all my conversations, and it’s making us all anxious and afraid.
I want Friends From New York to be part of the answer to what we do about it, by giving us more reasons to participate in the present.
To talk, dance, debate, create, and live.
More news about gatherings soon.
Heidi
Friends From New York
NEW ON THE PODCAST: The lovely DJ MOS joins me to talk about why going out and dancing still matters.
This week on SoundCloud on all platforms next week!
I don’t want to make more things for people to scroll past. I want to create the things you would actually leave the house for.
Tell me what you want to do, who you want to meet, and what would make Friends From New York worth showing up for.
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