Human Connection in a Digital Flood
The Music Building ◖∿♥︎∿◗
Dear Friends,
Digital technology and AI are incredible tools with the capacity to help us reach new levels of creativity, generosity, and abundance... but if we're not careful, they can just as easily enable us to sink into deeper passivity, isolation, and atrophy. It’s up to us.
As technology progresses, we must learn to use it responsibly and intentionally. I find this to be especially true when it comes to art and human connection.
Very soon we will no longer be able to differentiate between art created by humans or by AI. When this happens, digital content will be released at an exponential rate. It will become impossible to find genuine human connection amidst the flood of content.
We created the internet—a world wide web—to connect with each other across the globe. We are moments away from this web becoming a trap which no longer connects us, but isolates and restrains us.
But we are so much more than our digital life. These are great tools we've made, but it's time to see them for what they are—tools. Tools for us. Tools for living.
Art has connected humans throughout history, each work somehow expressing something true from all of us.
Music has led the way for our culture’s collective growth—through our hardest challenges and our greatest victories.
The artist plays a crucial role in a song we are all creating together.
Over the past 25 years, it has become increasingly challenging for us as a culture to let music connect us due to the sheer volume of content available on the internet. This challenge is about to become an impossibility.
The internet as it is will no longer serve as a means for human connection. If we're honest, it hasn't for quite some time. We must find a better way to connect.
Today I am announcing a small step we are taking to help us deepen connection through music and togetherness. Beginning in Oak Park, It's a simple little website: themusicbuilding.org
This is a space where music is shared with two criteria:
Artists here are local—performing, living, and creating right here in our community.
Artists here are expressing something human. They are braving the blank page, receiving the signals from the atmosphere, and letting our song speak through their voice.
These are the Bachs and Dylans of our time, creating authentic human connection through sound, showing us the way forward.
I want to be clear: this is not an anti-technology initiative. This is an initiative to change the way we use technology, and to take back a responsibility that should never have been left to an algorithm, but must lie on our shoulders as human beings: to choose.
No matter how great our tools become, we are the creators.
What this means for us:
When you come here, you will find music created by the human musicians in your own community. While this list begins in Oak Park, its spirit can take root anywhere. This is a template that any community can use to build spaces for music and togetherness.
These are the people who do the work daily of allowing the song—our song—to flow through. They steward it from start to finish. They let it ache in their soul and dance in their heart. They spend days, weeks, years at their instrument, at the paper, practicing, writing, crafting. They do whatever is required to serve the song, and therefore to serve us.
We need these artists to do their work, and they need us to receive it—to support and champion them as critical servant-leaders of our culture and community.
I'm inviting us to look up from our screens and see what is right here: each of our communities is full of powerful musicians, beautiful spaces, wonderful people, and abundant resources!
This space can foster a connection between the wealth of our community and the wealth of our artists. We can flip the script on the “starving artist.”
This can go way beyond a website, and because it’s local, it naturally will. For today, I’m starting with a simple list of Oak Park musicians, along with ways to receive and support their work. We’ll build from here as we go.
I hope this project helps us steer toward deeper human connection, using our amazing tools to support our intention to connect, heal, and grow together.
I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas, whether you're in Oak Park or elsewhere. And if you want to be involved, let us know.
-Nathan
Originally posted at: https://nathanpeterson.net/the-music-building/