Paul D. Miller - DJ Spooky
Paul D. Miller is a philosopher, avant-garde artist, author, composer, multimedia producer and turntablist. He’s also released albums and toured internationally as DJ Spooky - that subliminal kid.
He’s currently putting the finishing touches on an upcoming album based on using AI and Blockchain technology and has recently created Quantopia - a new multimedia performance celebrating the 50th anniversary of the internet, featuring a chamber string ensemble & the San Francisco Girls Chorus - but the list of things he’s thinking about could fill a book. It certainly fills a 30 minute podcast interview…
AI Transcription
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, book, media, dj, jazz, charlie parker, hip hop, internet, climate change, music, sir tim berners, hand, realise, pillaging, sound, beat, 90s, scratch, rereading, listen
SPEAKERS
Paul D Miller, Andrew Dubber
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Dubber. I’m the director of Music Tech Fest, and this is the MTF podcast. Now, back when I was still a university professor, one of the people I would always insist my students read was Paul D. Miller. His book rhythm science was required reading and use the DJ mixing cuts up technique as a template for understanding media, culture, technology, and society. And it also happens to be a very good clue to unpicking how he thinks. And of course, I also always made an effort to work some of his music into my classes, as well as into my old radio shows back in the day, because Paul D. Miller, is far better known as DJ Spooky that subliminal kid and his avant garde turntable ism broke the concept of genre and the boundaries of hip hop, as he partnered with jazz pianist Matthew Shipp on one record, and Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo on the next. He’s a polymath, composer, record producer, philosopher, multimedia artist and writer. And he joined me on the MTF podcast for a chat about Charlie Parker, jogging, musical virtuosity, catastrophic climate change, virtual reality, the beat poets, the nature of evil, dressmaking literacy, polar discovery, social justice, science fiction, subjective reality, the rise of computational power, some book recommendations, the anniversary of the birth of the Internet, and a whole lot more that you wouldn’t believe we could pack into just allegedly and thoroughly enjoyable half hour chat. This is the incredible DJ Spooky. Paul D. Miller. Very, very good to have you here. And thank you for joining us for The MTF podcast.
Paul D Miller
Thanks. It’s a pleasure. I’ve heard great things about what you guys are up to. And it’s a pleasure to be here.
Andrew Dubber
Fantastic. So you’re also known as DJ Spooky, and that subliminal kid, where does that name come from?
Paul D Miller
Well, it’s kind of funny. Here we are in 2019. And it’s the 15th anniversary of the internet. I love to bring that up as a as a punctuation point, if you think about the comma or semicolon in a sense. So long story short, William S. Burroughs is a big hero of mine, and he wrote a book that there’s a character called the subliminal kid. And his books like Naked Lunch and so on are big inspirations for me to think about link language as a virus. That was one of his main things. Yeah. So 2019 to 1969. And earlier, the subliminal kid was a character that kept reappearing in his novels. Right? He had a novel called Nova Express. And so I just sort of remixed and pulled that nickname from there was that kind of cut up approach to literature, something that influenced you when you started approaching turntableism? Oh, my God. Absolutely. I mean, the cut up technique and the way modern memory works, it’s you cannot separate the two because we’re all bombarded with fragments. And I think the beat poets kind of got that was stream of consciousness narrative. So in the 1950s, and 60s, recorded media was not as democratic as it is now to walk around with a tape recorder like William S. Burroughs and cut up the tapes was must have been a radical, you know, vision. But at the same time, Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsburg, they were exploring language as a kind of a technology. And I think that the beat poets really explored the outer limits of how poetry and music conclave recordings, pulling apart sound. That was really a radical vision at that time. So DJ culture a little bit a couple decades later, vinyl had become more ubiquitous and democratised and you were able to just gradually build your record collection. But you didn’t want to play all the songs in your record collection. You just play fragments. So Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, they set the tone for how I think about social space with sound. Meanwhile, the beat poets made me think about the fine arts of the sound kind of like some a mashup of those two worlds,
Andrew Dubber
right? The idea of literature and DJ culture and I guess academia all come together. How do you kind of position yourself what do you what do you describe yourself as first and foremost?
Paul D Miller
A man of many hats. Literally, I have lots of hats. Right? The pun for me is that interdisciplinary art is our vocabulary. Now we all are DJs everyone is playing with media fragments, editing, whether or not we know when we’d crop a photo when we pull a sound from a file when we send a friend an mp3 or whatever format you want. So those kinds of remixable and editable experiences are the modern vernacular. So I started out as a writer, artist and musician, but DJing kind of became the in in game evolved that I grew up in Washington, DC and both parents were professors. My mom was a historian of design, named Rosemary Reed Miller, and she wrote books, one of her most well known books is called breads of time, 500 years of women designers, and my father was dean of Howard University’s law school. So I always grew up in a household that value design and historical thinking like nothing just magically appears. You always have to think there’s an ideology of every object around you have a good laugh. Top has an ideology that your the way you tie your shoelaces has an ideology, the fact that women’s pants don’t have pockets. My mom was a Marxist historian, she would write essays about that. Or sort of Marxist. But I won’t say, Yeah, I won’t split hairs on that one. But at the end of the day, when you have parents who are both really into that it just sort of sinks into your consciousness that nothing is neutral, everything carries some complex mechanism of thought or thought, you know, so DJing does seem to really get that as a basic structural mechanism for for thinking about collage appropriation, and above all, sharing files, music, and so on. Do
Andrew Dubber
you think the affordances of technologies as they progress become more free and open to that kind of use of media? Or is it becoming more restrictive in some ways?
Paul D Miller
You know, on one hand, corporations are pillaging everything right now, especially if you’re face, the Furious Five, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and then occasionally, you know, some of the other ones that sort of build up to the fifth dimension there. But, um, you are you are not your data. I mean, the fun part about our time is there’s a separation between analogue media, you know, playing vinyl going up to social spaces with actual real human beings. And then the digital mirror that sort of people are disc pillaging for for financial gain. So how does that work with your everyday experience? I mean, this is something I think we’re all kind of queasily, realising your your data is being used in all sorts of unanticipated ways. Whether it be for computational propaganda during the 2016 election stuff like Cambridge Analytica, or the internet. What was the IA group out of Russia in St. Petersburg, always they have a very generic name like the internet agency, then something really generic, but really freakin evil. So, um, you know, that’s on one hand, but then on the other hand, we’ve seen an explosion of all these platforms and routes for getting work out. More people are creative than ever before. More people being freed from the norms of how they think about expression, their work or getting out. So we’re seeing a renaissance of many, many different approaches, but at the same time, the there’s a Darwinism in effect with all these, you know, like I said, The Furious Five Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google five companies that dominate the landscape. Meanwhile, if you’re in China, you got the China versions of those Yuku, Alibaba, stuff like WhatsApp, etc.
Andrew Dubber
Yeah. As in Tencent, WeChat?
Paul D Miller
Yeah. And I feel like as an artist, these are intriguing. I personally, I could dig without social media, I would love to delete everything and just sit across from a person to have a glass of tea or whatever medium they they’re into, and actually have a human dimension there. But you didn’t realise why limit yourself because you have all of these different platforms, let’s play. And that’s kind of where I’m at. Now,
Andrew Dubber
You said something really interesting in Rhythm Science, which was this idea about how there is nothing that is not manmade, there’s nothing that is beyond civilization, they still think about the sort of the natural world like that this is all constructed.
Paul D Miller
Yeah, look around us. We’re on the heat a skyscraper with a view of Austin and the skyscrapers going up every day. Meanwhile, the river and the air systems are polluted and dealing with the Anthropocene era, kind of after effect. So how we look at the human imagination and how we think about how it expresses itself, in these toxic materials around us air pollution and climate change. You know, we’re literally in the middle of a huge mass extinction that’s been caused by human consumption patterns. You know, this is real stuff happening. It’s not like I’m going into my meet a climate denier. It’s like trying to argue with your toaster, you know, they just these people are so devastatingly lost in their own delusions about personal agency and their sense of being free of the world. But meanwhile, we are all locked and loaded into a system that we’re doing this huge experiment with, like every screen, we don’t even realise how much staring at a screen is messing our eyes up. Or we don’t you know, like, I’ll give you one funny example. In China, they’re having an epidemic of nearsightedness because so many kids are staring at screens, right. So when you think about the heart of your question, it’s like, human beings. If we can imagine something, we can usually start moving towards it. I don’t know. I one. I think response goes to the heart of what you’re saying is like the Greeks, they didn’t they never went to Antarctica. They never went to the North Pole, but they named them because they were looking at these star constellations, Arcturus, it’s just the root word for the the Greek term for the bear. Yeah. And the constellation of the bear was how they navigated in the Mediterranean. So that’s Arctic, you know, going to the north, but they said, Wait a second, if we got the North, we have to have the South too. So they had Antarctic. Uh huh. But they never went to either one. But they have the language to imagine those huge distance spaces.
Andrew Dubber
So does that imagine a potential make you hopeful optimistic About the or are we? Are we doomed?
Paul D Miller
I’m optimistic. I mean, I think the way our civilization is going right now is probably unsustainable. And there’s no question it’s going to have to either really redress inequality, it’s going to have to re address how we think about social justice and climate justice. And above all, how we look at, you know, the impact of refugees, because there’s going to be a tremendous amount of refugees as climate change goes into high gear. I think it’s already happening. They’ve had more fire at forest fires, oceans, islands, sinking, you know, etc. These are very clear signals that climate change is already reached massive proportions, but it’s going to get deeper, and it’s going to get weirder. I don’t know if we’re gonna have 7 billion people on this planet, but you know, by the end of the century, but it’s these are very odd and Strange Times, it’s like, human beings have played this incredible experiment on themselves saying, Let’s all stare at a screen for eight or 10 hours a day and see what happens. So, you know, if I was to respond, is there an optimistic thing? Yes, because we’re all much more aware. And we’re all exchanging information, which I think is the best and most powerful thing human beings have his access to information. And that makes our minds more agile and makes things more robust. But we can also be manipulated and pillaged and completely exploited because of the naivete, and the fact that a lot of people don’t have digital literacy, or just basic sensibility of being sceptical or circumspect about data manipulation, or, you know, whatever. You know, so it’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times.
Andrew Dubber
What’s the role of the Arts in all that?
Paul D Miller
the arts, um, you know, it just helps people think another world is possible, which is so important. I mean, your average kid is growing with social media and with other forms of sort of inundation that displays their sense of self. They’re clicking like on everyone else, they’re always being bombarded with like, someone else’s lifestyle on Instagram, or, you know, whatever. But you know, the arts really say, look, this is subjective. This is how I’m thinking, This is my emotional space. And that’s a powerful and beautiful thing. So I think art can help give us better tools. But we still need more tools to fight this kind of swirling chaos of the digital experiment we’ve all moved into.
Andrew Dubber
Are we fooling ourselves if we think that musics important, or should we just be, you know, putting away the entertaining things and going and dealing with things like climate change, and those sorts of things?
Paul D Miller
I think you can deal with any problem as an opportunity. And every crisis is an opportunity. That’s what a lot of economists would say. And there are different ways to shake up this kind of darwinistic situation that we’re in. So the good news is, like you’re saying, it’s like, what Sirius you know, as, of course, climate change, overpopulation, pollution, until, um, but there’s ways that you can address those issues, and not have to beat people over the head with it. I think this is where the left has said, Look, we can fight it by showing facts and data and information. And the right is like, you know what, I don’t care about any of that. What’s the good story? And save example, Trump is a bizarrely perverse story, but he is heated enough for all these right wing people to follow him like lemmings over the edge of civilization. So how do we deprogram people and give them better places to think because that’s what’s really, I think, critical. That’s where you need better storytelling abilities better, you know, voice of podcasts, whatever. And more there’s more people listening to podcasts now than ever in history. Well, there’s because people are very interested in information. But how do we activate and catalyse that that’s the sort of it’s I haven’t met a right wing person that it wasn’t open to a narrative. It just it has to be the right narrative to unlock their strange brain, you know, there’s our locked psychology. And my model these days, especially all the states that are really red states, right wing states are going to be hammered by storms hammered by flooding, hammered by all the climate stuff they’re denying. And like Alabama just had incredible storms. Meanwhile, their governors and all the senators and everybody’s like, oh, there’s no climate change, but their houses washed away in a river. So you know, these are things that are going to have to really think very hard about as they move further down the 21st century timeline,
Andrew Dubber
Where’s hip hop culture today?
Paul D Miller
Wow, these are great meta questions. Where is hip hop? I mean, part of it is everybody’s using the same software to make beats that you know fruity loops, Ableton Live and so on. So you can hear like trap you know, a lot of the drum beats and stuff have come become quite you know, standardised um, same with house hip hop techno dubstep, there’s a standardisation going on. Same with like the way people using auto pitch correction. to sound like these robotic singsong voices and so many songs right now, I’m I’m listening to old jazz and dub at the moment. So I’m probably the wrong person to ask. I’ve been listening to Charlie Parker, when my free time when I don’t want to think about electronic music, I’m listening to Charlie Parker’s birds. His stuff, you know, ornithology, for example, one of my favourite albums. Then on the other end of the spectrum, dub, like Lee “Scratch” Perry, and earlier, King Tubby, things like that. So hip hop, it’s gotten so commercial and so predictable. And you could do an applied artificial intelligence to analyse, which actually have done long story. But if you go by my website in about a couple weeks, we’re gonna have an album that’s working with artificial intelligence to generate electronic music for a project called, you know, the invisible hand. So we’re going to be doing generative adversarial networks to actually make better beats or better voices or better styles.
Andrew Dubber
Because there was a moment where it looked like jazz and hip hop were going to intersect. And then there was this kind of trajectory, we imagined where it was going to sort of let go for for rhythms or, you know, predictive melodies and those sorts of things. But it didn’t seem to happen. It seemed to be like, there was a kind of brief brush with the sort of the, you know, the aesthetics of jazz, you know, have a saxophone solo on it or something. But then it sort of departed ways. Again,
Paul D Miller
it ricocheted I mean, they they collided, cross section wise, and then like the collision spun both vehicles off, you know, into a different trajectory. I think jazz don’t know from hip hop and hip hop from jazz. That’s a good one. You know, there’s, there’s, there’s an argument there. I mean, say for example, with Nas his father was a blues musician, or if you look at like, you know, other pop producers like well, I am or even someone like Moby the most of their stuff does not have a jazz kind of component. But then on the other hand, DJ Premier, the roots, you know, these are really important. tastemakers in the medium. I’m on more of the avant garde side of stuff. So I’m agnostic about any particular zone. But yeah, a lot of jazz musicians never quite got into hip hop in the same way. But you’re right. They took the for for tempo. They took other kinds of minimalism approaches. And it’s think it’s been a very fruitful crossbreeding, you know, depends on what people are into. I love Pete Rock and CL smooth. They sampled jazz all the time. And some of their albums are still just classics of the 90s. And I feel like grandpa now saying, oh, the 90s and like, then you realise there’s actually the 90s is still really popular, people won’t let go of the 90s hip hop thing. Tribe Called Quest is jazz. Definitely. Yeah, yeah. And so on, and so on.
Andrew Dubber
And then you look at the the contemporary London jazz scene, for instance. And, and it’s infused with hip hop. And so it’s really interesting that there at least, there was the dialogue at some point that, that both parties went away with stuff. turntablism, particularly I’m also interested in because that was something that was, you know, there was a Doug Pray, documentary that came out. And then there was a sort of an explosion and people buying turntable the rest of it. Where is turntablism at now?
Paul D Miller
Wow, these are okay, it’s getting deeper in the rabbit hole here. Alright, so turntablism in one level, kind of went to a bedrock of like, there’s now all these DJ schools everywhere, DJ Academy, and so on. And so I’m scratching anatomy, which is great. On the other hand, it didn’t get it doesn’t have the same gravitational pull, as it did in the 90s and early 2000s. On the other hand, as well, vinyl has reached epic levels of sales. In fact, many people are saying it’s single handedly saving a lot of the music industry. So those are all good things, very positive things. I think that sometimes mediums become very popular. But the skill set to get in there and get creative, it takes you know, takes a couple months of just figuring it out, and then a couple years to get mastery. So most people have the attention span of a gnat, they’re not really gonna lock in on something that takes so long, even playing guitar, you could probably be up and running within a cup, like two or three weeks of practice DJing. And having a good feel for scratching and having a good field of sensibility of what makes sense over bead or over a certain style of scratch that takes a while. And you have to listen and listen. And listen. Listen, same with guitar playing too. Don’t get me wrong,
Andrew Dubber
I was gonna say if it’s only takes a couple of weeks, I’m doing something really badly wrong, because I’ve had 35 years of not being very good at the instruments. It’s, it’s a bit disappointing on that front. So it’s really interesting that there are all these kind of artistic expressions and outlets and so on. But one of the things that I think technologies are doing, particularly from a music creation perspective, is that they’re lowering the entry barrier for people to be able to make things that sound good to them. It’s not like sort of picking up a violin and spend three, three years sounding awful before you can play something but but I guess, taking away a little bit of the virtuoso side of things as well. Do you think that there’s, you know, there there are people who say learning a musical instrument should be hard to go along with it?
Paul D Miller
Well, there’s people like Malcolm Gladwell with his 10,000 hours rule, which I think is actually a good baseline. I don’t think it gives you an History per se, but it gives you a sensibility. And in order to have a good sensibility, when you need to have a good vocabulary and whatever medium, you got to sit down and listen to old records, you got to catch up on new stuff too. But then build a vocabulary of just sound and listening. I call it the art of listening, you’re always I listen to music quite a bit. But at the moment, I’m exhausted from contemporary stuff. And I’ve been listening to old jazz. Rob’s lifted a scratch routine while he that I always stuck with me, where he scratched the same as a horn solo, from Charlie Parker, which was great. For me, you know, the sensibility of something versus the master or something, we’re going to be moving in like lightspeed hyperspeed where you can imagine violins had centuries of development guitars have had centuries of development, whereas the software is changing every couple of weeks, right. You know, it’s we barely had time to be, you know, because the software and the medium and everything’s changing. The turntables only been around for, you know, a couple decades. So all of that is to say that these instruments, even half the keyboards everyone’s using have just been around briefly. I mean, Rob, and Bob is our Bob Moog vendor, the old keyboard in the 60s, Raymond Kurzweil, invented the Kurzweil keyboard in the 80s, Casio you know, Akai as the samplers, all that stuff is within just a couple of decades, right? So how deep can it get in that short amount of time, whereas violin cello, those instruments have had hundreds of years. And again, it’s it’s you’re walking a delicate line with saying what your taste is, too, because some people might like the fact that it sounds crazy and you’re sampling and cutting up a cello or some people might really want a pure Yo-Yo Ma recital. Oh, that’s crystal clear. Bach concerto or something? You know, I’m agnostic, I just say you know, all of the above it’s good. You know, I’m not really a partisan about different styles.
Andrew Dubber
You dabble with technologies and devil maybe is an insulting way of describing it. But But, but you explore blockchain, ai VR, you know, these things and you do projects and the secret to what end? Wow.
Paul D Miller
You know, it keeps life interesting. Okay, let’s, strictly speaking, because if I was doing the same thing over and over and over, I would be bored out of my mind. As a fan of Matter of fact, I was disenchanted with music for the last two and a half years or so. So I’m circling back to music. And during that last two and a half, three years, I’ve been doing a lot more film soundtracks, which actually I found really fun and kind of cool to see how you put music and film and dimensionalize it. I’ll probably be circling back because I have an album coming out later this year that I’m going to be it’s called the invisible hand. It’s based on blockchain and AI. So I’ll be you know, it’s music. I’ve been DJing globally, I cannot believe it. But for 20 years now, it’s been like, mind blowing since the 90s.
Andrew Dubber
So you look exactly the same through it. So yeah, it’s obviously good
Paul D Miller
for you drink tea and go jogging? That’s my secret. But um, yeah, and I usually walk around 10 to 20,000 steps a day. Let’s see today rocked 12,000 so far, because we had the panel and but I’m still gonna get another 8000 steps in. Ah, but yeah, it’s there. There’s a lot of elements that go into music production that I find tedious and annoying. And there’s a lot of other mediums right now. They’re just fascinating. So keep life interesting. I mean, I think we’re all gonna live a lot longer if you stick to
Andrew Dubber
Or we’re all gonna die. It’s a race. Yeah.
Paul D Miller
Yeah. So I keep my mind active. And I’m always checking out different media, because that’s makes life interesting. That’s that’s the heart of your question, I think.
Andrew Dubber
Yeah. Tell me about quantopian.
Paul D Miller
All right. Well, here we are March 12 2019. And then on this day, actually, today’s the actual 30th anniversary of the web. On this day in 1989, which was a great year for hip hop to Sir Tim Berners-Lee made the first HTML website. And so I celebrate that with a salute him Sir Tim Berners-Lee, but it’s the 30th anniversary of the web. But the 50th anniversary of the internet is this year, and the first packets between two hubs of the internet were from UCLA in 1969 to Stanford Research Institute, October 29. So we’re going to do a big celebration of that. So Quantopia is sort of a homage to the 50th anniversary of the internet as we know it, which is older than the web. Don’t forget, people will burst into flames if you blur the especially geek culture. They’ll get mad if you say the internet’s the web and so on. But if you go back to the history of distributed network systems, ARPANET, and the way it proceeds, the web really was set up in an academic environment. And thank God it was because if it set up in a corporate environment, you’d have IBM or some of the earlier Information Systems corporations controlling everything. But both Sir Tim Berners-Lee and David Kleinrock, David Kleinrock was the person, first person to deal with a lot of the packet switching codes for the internet from 1969. Those two both are working in academic environments and thus the internet is free as we know So I celebrate that. So Quantopia is a homage. It’s a VR Symphony. And it’s also kind of when I say Symphony, I’m using air quotes there. It’s a string ensemble with I’m sampling and running elements live. And I’m also working with a chorus singing binary code. And we donated the project to archive.org, you know, the archive, I’ll send you a link to it. But basically, it’s a way of getting people to think about the way that the internet has unfolded over 50 years. And if you think about how powerful and weird that is, I’m 48, by the way, so I’m grandpa for DJ culture. But 50 years, the world has radically changed. I mean, I remember, in the ancient 90s, it would take hours to download one mp3. And you’d have to do a dial up tone and everything else. And the sheer volume of computational power in your cell phone now. You know, it’s been 10 years, since the first iPhone came out in 2008, to 2018 19. And in that 10 years, it’s been an incredible revolution of mobile media. So quantopian celebrates all of that.
Andrew Dubber
And from the academic side of things as your traditional academic, and that you teach you research you write, you do less things.
Paul D Miller
I’m not a traditional anything.
Andrew Dubber
I guess that’s fair.
Paul D Miller
Uh, I’m kind of just someone who’s really interested information, I read voraciously. And I’m always checking out stuff. So like I said, My motto is it makes life interesting. I the worst torture you could inflict on me as to make me have to do or listen to, or check out the same shit every day for like, years, that will be like my version of hell or something. But to keep life interesting means you got to be open, you have to be always I firmly believe in a dynamic relationship to the arts. And that means you’re going to be dealing with zillions people and all sorts of different cities, countries, nations. Quantopia is kind of an acoustic portrait of the internet. So that’s, you know, it that probably is going to tour for a while. And I’m really happy with the way it’s unfolded. But to go to the again, to go to some of the I think the subtext of your question is, how do we as creatives, think about the evolution of content, really, that’s, that’s the foundation of the 21st century is, we’re in a huge revolution of all these platforms for content, YouTube, Vimeo, and so on. musicians are getting hammered with streaming, nobody’s making any money there. Then you have other platforms like Kickstarter, or Patreon, all of which are just different ways to monetize this sharing impulse, like getting your material out. And these are things that are lingering over. I’m in the final days of this last album, so I’m just trying to get my thoughts together on that. And, you know, so these are questions I asked myself, too.
Andrew Dubber
All right, let’s, let’s end you can set up some homework. What should we go read off the back of this entity?
Paul D Miller
Wow. Okay, I read a lot. So let me I’m going to narrow it down to three books. four books, I think are great. Anything by Cory Doctorow. I’m a huge fan of his work. There’s also a new book by Shoshana Zuboff, called the rise of surveillance capitalism really sharp in each in deeply insightful book about well, surveillance capitalism. You know, you are you are not your data is I’ll just leave that one right there. And then I’m, I’m rereading some science fiction classics. Because there’s the alita Battle Angel that came out, I went back to reread the comic book, that manga that that’s based on, it’s kind of fun. And then I’m rereading Alastair Reynolds, who’s a Welsh science fiction writer, as a book called The terminal world that’s set in the distant future where Earth has been devastated and there’s people live in this crazy city that’s a vertical city that’s highly stratified and on each level, only exist certain kinds of technology that you’re it’s highly regulated, dystopian novel, bizarre, interesting. I like I like his work a lot. I’m also rereading Neil Stevenson Snow Crash, just because the world feels more and more Snow Crash vibe, especially with computational propaganda and the sort of the politicisation of memes and the way memes kind of loop people into this different transfers of information that, like fox news or whatever. Those are three books or kind of, well, a cluster of books that I think are interesting. Also, oh, you know, what’s his name? He did this book The uninhabitable Earth wireless. That’s a brilliant book. And he’s doing some really sharp stuff with thinking about radical and drastic climate change. David, David Wallace wells, the uninhabitable Earth. pretty grim. But, but sharp, him and Shoshana Zubov. If you’re going to think that these are all going to be like everyone singing happily as we dance in the garden of you know, the Wizard of Oz or something. It’s it’s much darker than that.
Andrew Dubber
But with the soundtrack of Lee Scratch Perry and Charlie Parker, it seems like a nice way to do it.
Paul D Miller
Yeah, well, if you’re I’m on an aeroplane every two or three days, and it just makes life bearable. Well, the first thing I do is when I get to new hotel, let’s drop my bags usually go for a five to seven mile run. Then catch up on zillions of messages, emails, and so on. And I don’t like jogging with headphones, but a lot of people do. Yeah, but I will listen to music when I’m writing or working. Paul, thanks so much for being with us today. Always a pleasure. Let me know how all this goes.
Andrew Dubber
The brilliant Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, and that’s the MTF podcast, you may need to go back and listen to this one again a few more times. I certainly have. And while you’re at it, feel free to share like start rate review and above all, subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts, it’s free. And it just means that next Friday and every Friday after that, the next episode will just be delivered straight to you with no hassle whatsoever. In the meantime, have a fantastic week and we’ll talk soon Cheers.
