J.D. Moyer

sci-fi author, beatmaker

Purpose Is the Fifth Idol

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On September 16

In Creative Work/Career, Culture Rants/Shares, Utopian Speculations

In Tim Ferriss’s recent interview with Arthur Brooks, Brooks discusses the four false idols, what Thomas Aquinas called “the four substitutes for God.” Aquinas named those substitutes as honor, wealth, pleasure, and power, but Brooks uses fame as an Instagram-age stand-in for honor.

In this short, Brooks uses U.S. cities to demonstrate each of the four false idols, or vices: New York is money (wealth), D.C. is power, Vegas is pleasure, and Los Angeles is fame. He asks which one motivates you? Which one leads you to make poor decisions?

That got me thinking, what’s the main vice of San Francisco? Historically, pleasure has its role in the Barbary Coast sense. So does wealth (gold rush, tech booms, etc.). But I would say SF’s main vice is purpose. A lot of San Francisco’s ambition is funneled toward meaning, vision, and progress. This can become pathological in a number of ways. San Francisco’s Summer of Love had a dark, druggy, rapey, violent underbelly. Visions of improving society with technology can easily tip into Panglossian techno-utopianism.

And maybe that’s what Aquinas meant, at least partially, by honor. Because there’s a performative aspect to the pursuit of purpose and progress. We (especially San Franciscans) want to to appear as if we’re doing good deeds and making the world a better place. So sometimes we virtue signal more than we act virtuously. It’s not for want of fame, it’s the desire to have a good reputation, to be seen as honorable, that can get us in trouble.

And then there’s the true believers, who get a dopamine high by pursuing their dreams for the future of humanity and society: a colony on Mars, self-aware computer programs, fleets of self-driving electric cars, fusion power that provides unlimited electricity at negligible cost. What could go wrong?

Even the artistic side of purpose has a dark side. Putin’s dark reign is greatly inspired by the science fiction works of author Mikhail Yuriev. Purpose is my own main vice–my desire to write science fiction is largely purpose driven. And while I don’t think my science fiction works have injured anyone, it’s always possible to put bad ideas out into the world. And the blind pursuit of purpose via art can easily lead a person to personal and financial ruin.

So yeah, purpose is the fifth idol. Fame certainly belongs on the list, but Aquinas didn’t know about Hollywood or Instagram. So honor should be subdivided into fame and purpose.

What’s Next? Post-Pandemic Expansiveness…

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On July 26

In Creative Work/Career, Personal Updates

Guess which one bit me?

Over the course of the pandemic, I had a pervasive sense of deferment. I postponed many projects and activities with the mindset of “just trying to get through.” Which was appropriate, I think, given that the pandemic took a mental toll on me, as it did with most people. I prioritized the things that absolutely had to get done. For 2020 through 2022 that included:

  • Finding a better school for my kid and everything else that involved (moving, remodeling and renting out our house, adjusting to a new location)
  • Retooling my tech skills and taking on some new clients
  • Continuing to write fiction and make music
  • Doing my best to stay healthy and avoid getting a bad case of Covid (getting vaccinated, reducing social exposure, etc.)

But many things were backburnered, including:

  • Actively advancing my writing career (finding an agent, submitting new work)
  • Social plans, maintaining relationships with a wide circle of friends and acquaintances
  • Fitness and sport
  • Many of my hobbies (especially tabletop gaming and miniature painting, which I used to do every week)
  • Travel

The pandemic is generally considered to be over, but the world still feels chaotic, and the temptation to keep deferring things is strong. Climate disasters are unfolding left and right, fascists and bigots are on the rise in the US and worldwide, the war in Ukraine is far from over, and the US economy is iffy at best.

But personally, I do have more bandwidth. I’m trying to decide how I want to use my free time and attention. Generally I’m feeling more expansive. I want to see old friends and make new ones. I want to write and publish more fiction and more music. I’d like to travel to places I’ve seen as well as to locations I’ve never visited.

That said, I’ll probably take on too much and then feel overwhelmed. But for now, the plan is to DO MORE and SAY YES more often.

Oh, and one thing to share, a new melodic house music Spotify playlist from me and Spesh, just some tracks we’re enjoying at the moment.

And one more thing, I’m @johndavidmoyer on Threads, haven’t fully committed yet but I did tweet my first thread, or whatever. About the new secretly filmed BART movie.

New Novella Acceptance, Thoughts on Gender Dysphoria, Art and Money

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On July 3

In Creative Work/Career, Culture Rants/Shares

Australian Giant Cuttlefish photographed by Richard Ling

Announcement

My novella “The Discovery at Alexandria”, a far-future triptych featuring cuttlefolk (uplifted cuttlefish), arcology-dwelling humans, and nomadic dogkin, was recently officially accepted by Sheree Thomas for Fantasy & Science Fiction. I’m delighted to have found a great home for this story. Publication date TBD (could still be awhile). This will be my first published novella. Inspiration came from the Murderbot series of novellas by Martha Wells, David Brin’s Uplift Saga, and Evolution by Stephen Baxter (among many other works).

Recent Thoughts and Speculations — Gender Fluidity and Anabolic Steriods

I’m not an expert on gender fluidity or gender dysphoria, but I’ve been thinking about testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) and anabolic steroid use, which is rampant not only among professional bodybuilders and MMA fighters, but also among teenage gym rats trying to get “aesthetic” and men my own age trying to recapture our fading youth. Should steroid use among men trying to appear (and feel) more masculine be part of the conversation around gender dysphoria? While “hyper-masculine” isn’t a distinct gender, it’s a very narrow band on the gender spectrum, and can only be achieved via unusual/rare genetics or the use of exogenous male hormones (combined with a great deal of strenuous exercise).

I think it’s potentially useful to bring “men trying to be more manly” into the conversation around gender fluidity and dysphoria. We’re all somewhere on the gender spectrum with a unique cocktail and ratio of male and female sex hormones and brain architecture, sometimes lining up with our birth-assigned gender, sometimes not. More importantly, many of us would like to be in a different place on that spectrum than we actually are. Sometimes exogenous hormones are the right choice, sometimes a dietary change might be appropriate (less alcohol and more cruciferous vegetables, for example, to reduce estrogen in men), and sometimes more self-acceptance might be the ticket.

Maybe some of the hysteria around gender-change politics could be mitigated if we included bro-dudes like Joe Rogan (who uses TRT) in the category of people who want to shift their position on the gender spectrum (albeit only slightly).

Art-spiration

I’m in a good groove with both fiction writing and music-making these days, and part of the reason why is that I have currently enough money. People make great art under all kinds of conditions, including extreme poverty, but it’s much easier to make art if one has the privilege of mentally divorcing time and money. It can take hours to write a good paragraph (or even a shitty paragraph). Same goes for a four-bar musical phrase, or a painting, and sometimes hundreds of hours of hard work don’t amount to anything tangible (like a sale, or even a completed work). From a purely economic POV, most art-making is a waste of time.

Even when financial security does come along, the mental prison of time=money can still hold us back. Time is time, time is us living our lives, and money allows us more freedom. But we still have to take that freedom, to use it, to break out of our productivity conditioning.

Hope you are enjoying the summer! Feel free to comment about whatever is on your mind.

A Proposal for Distributing Royalties for AI Generated Artworks “in the style of…”

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On June 14

In Creative Work/Career, Culture Rants/Shares

I’ve been experimenting with Midjourney 5, which is probably the leading generative AI for visual images. But it’s not there yet, in terms of both image quality and ethical use.

Image quality — Midjourney often creates monstrosities of merged limbs, unnatural joint insertions, and other body horror fodder. Some examples from the prompt “two women embracing in a futuristic city”. Two of the images look more or less anatomically correct, while the other two, well…ouch.

I know I sound like someone complaining about wifi quality on an airplane. I’m overlooking the miraculous fact that such a thing can happen at all, instead focusing on the deficits. But that’s how people relate to technology. If it doesn’t work all the way, it’s basically worthless.

I assume with time that Midjourney and other generative AI will gain a better understanding of what can and cannot happen with a human body. But there are also major ethical concerns with using such technology. In the example image I used “in the style of” followed by the name of an Italian graphic novel illustrator. Midjourney did a reasonable job of approximating the artist’s style, which leads me to believe that the AI has used this artist’s artwork for neural net training.

So should the Italian graphic novel illustrator get a cut of what I paid to use Midjourney (a license that includes commercial use rights)?

I’ve heard the argument that human artists also train by observing and even manually copying the work of other artists, and they don’t pay royalties or ask permission. So why should an AI?

I think the process by which an AI trains on human-created content is much closer to sampling and repurposing, and much less like human learning. So absolutely, the human artist should get a cut.

The royalty system could look something like this:

  1. As an artist (visual, fiction, any kind), you could opt-in or opt-out of having your work sampled and repurposed by AI. If you opted out, the AI would not allow your name to be used as part of a prompt. Midjourney already includes all kinds of restrictions (including a prohibition against creating erotic images), so this additional restriction would be technically trivial to implement.
  2. Those that opted in would receive a prorated share of user subscription fees based on how many images or works were generated by that user account. So if a user generated 100 images in a month, and five of them were “in the style of Artist XYZ”, then the artist would receive 5% x TheRoyaltyRate% x subscription fee per month.
  3. I’d argue that a fair royalty rate would be somewhere between 50% and 85% (Midjourney keeping 15-50%). A 15% share is common for distribution and administration services, while a 50% share would include more compensation for those that develop and maintain the AI algorithms and neural nets. The exact percentage (and the option of advances against future royalties) would be something for tech companies and artist agencies to haggle over.
  4. Users might also user broader prompts like “in the style of Italian graphic novels”. In that case, the royalty share could be divided among all Italian graphic novel illustrators. But that begs the question of how Italian graphic novel illustrators who opted OUT would be compensated (because we can safely assume that generative AI are indiscriminately hoovering up and utilizing all the images they can find on the internet). So some of the “broad prompt” money would need to be put aside to somehow funnel back to those artists (or their estates), either as grants or as a pool that qualifying artists could apply for.

Of course all this will probably need to be legislated. Midjourney is getting away with murder right now, and they aren’t going to change anything unless someone makes them.

Communications from my Past Self (and other reasons to write)

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On May 20

In Creative Work/Career, Metablog, Personal Updates, Writing

East Cut neighborhood in San Francisco

I’m gearing up for some changes to this site. Probably a new theme, and hopefully a better system for signing up for my newsletter.

Considering these changes has led me to consider what this blog is for. Self-expression? Self-promotion? Is it a lifestyle blog? A health blog? A creativity blog?

Sure, all of the above. But here are the reasons that resonate with me the most right now:

1. To think more clearly. For me at least, there’s no substitute for writing about a topic in order to understand it, to formulate and articulate my views. I write, therefore I think.

2. To have a record of what I was thinking and feeling at a particular time. Just today I reread a post I’d written from when I’d overcommitted to work, and was feeling overwhelmed. At the moment I feel like I don’t have quite enough freelance work, which creates some financial stress. But reading my previous post reminded me that I said some no-thank-yous to give myself more time to work on writing and music. So that’s what I should do.

3. To grow my readership. I haven’t put much energy into this, but it is important to me. Having regular readers is great for so many reasons. But it’s a responsibility, a two-way street, and if I’m not writing interesting and helpful posts then I can’t expect an audience to stick around.

And here are a couple reasons that don’t, or no longer, resonate with me:

1. To write about health topics. Bottom line, I’m not a medical professional. I have a deep interest in nutrition and human health, but there are also huge gaps in my knowledge. In another life I might have become a nutritionist or naturopath, but that’s not the path I chose. And that’s not the kind of reader I want to attract or interact with.

2. To sell something. This blog will never become a sales funnel to buy my course or eBook. I just have no interest in that. If you happen to discover one of my novels that you think you’d enjoy, and buy it, fantastic! But the primary purpose of this blog never was and never will be to make a quick buck.

Personal Updates

  • I recently returned from the Nebulas Conference in Anaheim. It was my first in-person writing conference since the beginning of the pandemic, and being around other authors was incredibly energizing. I didn’t have any particular agenda beyond learning and socializing, but I ended the weekend with a slew of new ideas and a recharged writing battery. My friend Jane was nominated for a game-writing Nebula for her work on a recent D&D book, and though GRRM won the award for Elden Ring, I felt very happy for her and her team. I also met Steve Lerner, the writer of Stray (nominated in the same category)–I look forward to playing the cyber-cat game. As for novels, I’m currently reading and enjoying Daughters of Tith by J. Patricia Anderson.
  • The quiver of complete, unpublished fiction is getting pretty full, and in the coming months I’ll be shifting my efforts to submitting more work for publication, and possibly taking another crack at the agent querying process. At the moment I’m working on revisions of Green Dawn (previously titled The Savior Virus), a near-future medical thriller/sci-fi novel.
  • There are a few social issues I’m trying to think more clearly about, so I’ll probably write about them in the near future. A few of the questions I’m considering:
    • What Should the Left Do About Men? (high male unemployment, falling educational levels, social isolation, etc.)
    • How Can Labor Disrupt the False Promises of AI-Enhanced Productivity?
    • What are the Most Effective Ways Citizenry can Reclaim Power from Fascist/Authoritarian Leaders and Groups?
  • I have two new EDM releases out:

That’s all for today, hope you are enjoying your weekend!

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