The Death of the Artist in the Age of Algorithms

— And the Fight to Stay Human

Dear friends,

Our lives are accelerating before our eyes.

Even before AI, creatives were already drowning—expected to do their real work and churn out constant content to feed the machine.

Social media primed us for it. AI just made it faster.

On the surface, it looks like a solution: now we can create more with less effort. But take a step back, and it’s clear—we’ve built a madhouse around ourselves.

The internet is full of polished, soulless mimicry. And the rest of us are left scrambling—either keep up, or disappear.

But what’s missing from the conversation—and what I want to explore here, desperately and honestly—is what this is doing to the human spirit.

My premise is this:

The “ease” of AI collides with the modern pressure to be always online—to build a brand, to stay relevant, to not vanish. And in that collision, something fractures.

We’re no longer going through the labour of our own thought. Insight without effort isn’t truth—it’s simulation.
And when you sever the link to process, you sever the link to self.

What’s left isn’t creation.
It’s output.
Acceleration.
Noise — dressed up to look like meaning.

This is the newsletter I didn’t want to write—but had to.

Because like Neo before the red pill, I needed to see the system for what it is—and choose something else.

This is my red pill.

If you’re short on time, I’ve recorded this as a podcast too. Otherwise—
Let’s dive into the Matrix.

Jim

p.s I received a message from a reader asking for more photography. Thank you for the prompt! I’ve popped in some moments from my own life in arts, in the hope that it contextualises and humanises the ideas.

---

“You take the blue pill… the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill… you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

— Morpheus to Neo in the Matrix

A paranoid solo protest, 2018, Minsk, Belarus — screening The White Arrow in one of Europe’s worst countries for media freedom: censorship, arrests, exile.

Intro

Sometimes you have to have the courage to tear it all apart.

You want to stay positive.
You want to guard against cynicism.
You want to affirm life.

And yet —
Something feels off.
There’s a problem lurking in the shadows.

“To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation… and, at the same time, threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”
— Marshall Berman

At some point, you realise that your optimism, your get-up-and-go, is no more than a builder trying to lay bricks during an earthquake.

We know we’re in a storm — and yet we refuse to admit it to ourselves.

Sometimes, the healthiest response to a society gone mad is to tear the whole edifice down.

When I look at the digital tomb we’ve encased our spirits in, I feel this — even while participating in the madness so vigorously myself.

And yet, within that, I want to let out a Nietzschean war cry.

Ah, now I know how you felt, dear Friedrich.
You couldn’t help but diagnose the sickness — and once you saw how deep it ran, you realised the only cure was to destroy it first.

Today, I want to let myself go a little.

Because sometimes, the first act of defiance is to start your own private revolution.

And frankly, I see a society that has lost its mind.
And it’s only now I realise:
If I don’t name it — if I don’t find my own words for it —
I’ll never unplug myself from the terrifying, silent scream of so many spirits trapped inside the Matrix.

---

Fundraising for the Boat for Sara, Idomeni, Greece 2016

1 The Modern Creative Paradox

Must one really become a superhuman just to survive this?

When was the last time you woke up and felt gently on top of life?

There was a time before the acceleration took over.
When you could actually be in what you were doing —
rather than live inside the mania that it must simply be done, and as soon as possible.

You didn’t even notice it happening — but somehow you feel like you’re always behind.

Not just on your to-do list.
Existentially behind.

As if your body and your spirit have split in two —
and your physical self can never quite keep pace with what’s expected of you.

It’s not just that you can’t do enough.

You can’t even be inside the thing you’re doing—so overwhelmed are you by what actually needs doing, what could be done, and what should be done—if only you were more capable, more tuned in, more together.

Somewhere along the way, you started noticing something strange.

You are yourself —
but not quite.

ChatGPT said:

You feel the potential inside yourself, but no matter how hard you try to access it, to express it, it’s never quite enough.

You are never enough.

And so you live in this fantasy version where you’re always on the crest of completion — but never seem to quite reach the shore.

And the strange part? It’s everywhere.

Just the other day, I overheard a conversation in a café:
“How’s the channel?” one man asked.
“Slow,” the other replied.

There it is again — that gnawing sense that whatever you’re doing,
it’s never quite what it could be.

And in that strangely common feeling — this quiet sense of not being enough —
I’ve noticed a shame that sits just beneath the surface.
Not loud.
But present.
A shame few can name,
and fewer still know where it comes from.

So let me outline where I believe it comes from — because it’s only after naming the beast that you can start tackling it.

---

Setting out to tour China after losing my deal with EMI 2014

2 The Day Content Replaced Creation

We’re living through a shift no one fully prepared us for.

Social media built a treadmill you never walk off —
a relentless loop of performance, visibility, and noise.

Somewhere along the way, your profile became more important than your CV.

Artists saw this first.
But then it crept into business life too —
especially once LinkedIn morphed from a job site into a workplace feed of humblebrags and personal brands.

And indeed; personal brand began its slow, quiet takeover —
reshaping how we present ourselves, and how we’re perceived.

As a musician, you no longer sent out demo tapes.
You needed proof of quality —
which meant 20K+ Instagram followers, not a great live set.

Then came the explosion of TikTok — and views became the new currency.

While all this happened, it became less important for musicians to gig, and even if they did, it wasn’t like any A&R scouts were going to concerts any more.

The real world?
What a waste of time — we can see them online!

Hell, half the venues were one rent hike from extinction—strangled by astronomical costs, gutted by foreign real estate sharks, and left for dead by a zombified culture that traded sweat, beer, and distortion for noise-cancelling earbuds and algorithmic hypnosis.

In this new environment, what mattered wasn’t raw energy or connection —
but social proof.

And then it happened.

Subtly at first.
And then all at once.

Content became king.

---

Recording this week’s podcast while realising that in this AI modern hall-of-mirrors, to have a history is a privilege

3 When Content Killed the Work

The social media companies rewarded output and consistency.

And more than that, they democratised the possibility of fame.
You were always just one viral hit away.

And what did it create?

A tsunami of slush.

Look, I’ve got no quarrel with cat pictures — they’re the last innocent thing left on the internet. But if your work comes slow and bloody, stitched together from silence and doubt, the scroll didn’t just pass it by — it absorbed it, dulled it, and forgot it in the time it took to swipe.

The result?

It started, subconsciously at least, changing your process.
Somehow — and without realising it — you began to feel like the real world didn’t matter anymore.

It was a strange time to be alive.
I remember, during one of my first long hiatuses from the internet, someone said to me,
“Jim, why don’t you post music videos anymore? If it’s not on YouTube, it’s not real!”

It hit hard. Because I knew something had shifted.

The artistic path suddenly felt less about what you made, and more about showing that you’d made it.

In the content tsunami that followed, the first people to get washed away were the artists from the old world.

If you wanted to make it on social media, it wasn’t about the work, it was about social currency.

Soon the creators with big followings started teaching other creators how to get big followings — by posting content about how to post content. And somewhere in that endless hall of mirrors, the simulation started eating the real thing. You can see it right here on Substack: the same playbook looping on repeat, every other Note a recycled gospel of growth — how to write Notes about Notes that help you write better Notes so you can finally grow a following big enough to... write more Notes.

I’m in my 40s now, and looking back, so many of the best talents I saw clocked out years ago.

Apart from the obvious fact that many of the ways you could get paid as an independent artist had vanished — from selling CDs and then later, even touring as a distribution mechanism - what you actually created was temporary and vanishing.

The most obvious sign?
A record release used to mark the beginning of a campaign.
Now, unless it performs extraordinarily, it often signals the end.

I know three artists personally who were dropped by Universal right after their album came out.

Society was moving so fast that unless your work became a cultural event, it became just another piece of content.

We'd entered a kind of slow-motion suicide ritual — where nothing lasted more than a day.

And artists began to ask:

Why am I spending so much time, money, and energy creating something meaningful-
if it’s just going to be fed into the scroll and forgotten?

The era of “create in order to create” had arrived.

Some mastered it.
And to be clear, there are many content creators I admire — people who found their voice inside the system.

But their success didn’t dissolve the reality many artists found themselves trapped in.

As for me? I clocked out.

I’ve never been one for games, especially when the rules are written by invisible hands.
And I’ve never liked jumping through someone else’s hoops either.

That’s exactly how Silicon Valley designed social media.
Maybe not at the beginning — early Instagram had a certain gentleness, a curated scrapbook feel.

But once Meta bought it, the shift was clear:
It became akin to social Darwinism.

If you wanted to grow, you had to prove to the platform that you could keep up.
That was the contract.

What we couldn’t have predicted was how completely this would take over society.

Instagram is just one facet of it — but it’s a useful metaphor for the whole.

Because here’s the thing:
The requirement for constant content creation is antithetical to how art is actually made.

Of course, it’s easy to say, “Why don’t you just do both?”

I get it.

But here’s the catch:

Every hour you give to the digital world —
you’re borrowing it from somewhere else in your life.

And most artists don’t have hours to spare.

Ninety-nine percent live in the long tail.
They’re juggling work, family, health, relationships —
and barely carving out time to keep their creative life alive.

Content creation comes with a massive time and energy tax.

I’ll give you a recent example.

This year, I focused on longform — Substack essays, my podcast, and a weekly YouTube video.
But I wasn’t posting much shortform — and realised, if I wanted to grow, I had to play the game again.

Shortform still has discoverability.
Podcasts and newsletters are relationship platforms — they’re for an audience that has already opted in.
But to reach new people? You have to cut it up and deliver it in bite size.

And so recently, I’ve started trying to reboot this side of my online life.

Re-editing videos into reels.
Pulling out short-form text.
Designing carousels.
Developing photos.

Each of these things, in isolation, can be creative.
But when your week’s already at capacity — it’s a grind.
It’s time on top of time that you just don’t have.

And that’s just the thing:

We now live at total capacity.

These platforms are endlessly hungry beasts —
and the only way to grow on them is to allow yourself to be devoured over and over.

Now, I like some of the effects:
The community. The conversations. The connection.

But the process?

Chopping up the longform is frankly a pain in the arse.

I do it because it’s part of the work now.
But it does feel like time lost.

And I find that curious.
Because I know so many others — especially artists — who feel the same strain.

This continual pressure to feed something that feels, well… essentially anti-life.

And I genuinely wonder:
Will any of us look back from our deathbeds and think,
“Thank God I kept up with content”?

We don’t know yet.
But I think this will become a cultural reckoning over the next decade.

Because feeding an insatiable beast that forgets each day who is feeding it is not a good bet if you want to live a meaningful life.

And yet, we all bought into this Catch-22,
without ever noticing when we paid the price.

You do it because it seems necessary.

And then — one day —
you realise:

Your work is no longer your work — the content has become your work.

It might sound like a lightweight problem.
But I think it points to a much deeper cultural malaise.

Why?

Because every person, every artist, every creator —
has been thrown on a treadmill they didn’t build.

And the choice is brutal:

Keep up. Or disappear.

---

Recording a song in the government quarters of Ljubljana, Slovenia, fundraising for the SAR for Refugees

4 The Personal Brand Trap

Here’s the thing — many people in my generation baulked at social media.
And for a while, it felt like the healthy choice.

Nah, this is bull. I’m not playing that game.

But all these years later, the script has flipped.

Now it’s not just the people who chose to play who are scrambling to keep up —
it’s also the ones who once rejected it.

Because to participate in today’s market, you need a personal brand.
Without one, you’re not just overlooked — you’re starting from behind.

And it’s not just creatives wrestling with their place in this content tsunami.
It’s also people who never had any interest in being part of it in the first place.

I haven’t seen many cultural observers naming this —
but I believe it’s a key factor in the staggering mental health collapse we’re seeing among people in their 40s.

And I really mean it — there’s an epidemic of suicide.
Especially among men.

The numbers are brutal.
What’s worse is how quiet the conversation these numbers them remains.

In the UK, suicide is the leading cause of death for men under 50 (ONS, 2023).
And in the U.S., men in midlife make up less than a fifth of the population —
but account for nearly half of all suicides (Suicide Prevention Resource Center).

I can’t help but wonder how much of this is tied to something that society chooses not to see —the slow collapse of self-worth in a world where value is measured by visibility.

You scroll through everyone else’s highlight reel
while wrestling with your own unfinished life.

You feel behind, even if you were never trying to compete.

And here’s the cruellest part: even opting out doesn’t save you anymore, because now the algorithm isn’t just on your phone — it’s in your head, whispering: if you haven’t made it by now, maybe you never will.

So many arrive at midlife and realise their career hasn’t unfolded as they hoped.
And with that, the creeping sense that they’ve been just left behind.

I write this with a pit in my stomach.
I’ve already lost friends.

And it seems to me that many reach this point only to realise:
Not only did their dreams not materialise, but the world they were waiting for moved on without them.

Thoreau saw it in 1854 when he wrote

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

It’s only gotten quieter — and more desperate — since.

What once felt like a healthy, even playful rejection of social media
has become its own type of prison.

We’ve built a society where no one ever feels enough.

A never-enough society.

A culture of people who not only struggle with self-worth —
but feel like they’ve missed their shot at ever building it in the first place.

Too often, we’re tied to the idea of how the world sees us.
And the pervading sense that people seems to get as they get older is what’s the point in even trying to start now —
You’ll never catch up anyway.

Weirdly, you can say the same about self-worth and about one’s presence online. In this modern dystopia, it transpires they have become intimately linked.

Look, I know what life is. I’ve done that work. And by doing it, I’ve learned it’s not work that’s ever finished — it’s something you have to return to again and again, not just to grow, but to stay healthy in the first place. I’ve spent my whole life trying to find a deeper sense of self — something rooted beyond status or perception.

And like anyone, I struggle with it at times, but equally, having done this work in psychotherapy and my creative journey — I know each goblin there well. Hell, I’ve given them names!

But here’s the hard truth: for many people, self-worth is tied to visibility.

You are not “you” unless you show yourself to be “someone.”

Success has become the measure.
And the measure is metrics.

---

Thrilled I’d managed not to get knocked off the motorcycle filming in Kampala, Uganda 2014!

5 The Nuclear Code Hidden in the Like Button

Who could have known the degree to which the “like button” would gamify the human spirit?

It was one of the most genius modern inventions —
and the one that eroded the very fabric of society.

The paradox is this:
these platforms lured us in with the promise of free reach.
And once we were hooked — addicted, even — they pulled it back.

Now, not only have you sold your soul —
you’re being asked to pay rent on it.

So we arrive at this strange modern absurdity:
Most people are struggling financially,
Yet using what little money they have to grow their personal brand.

It’s a Ponzi scheme of the most ingenious kind:

Human works for money.
Human invests money in digital self.
Human becomes poorer.
Human feels like less.
Human works harder.
Human puts more money into the mythic “personal brand.”
Human doesn’t achieve the hoped-for result.
Human works for more money.
Repeat.

It’s a loop as brutal as it is invisible.
And the worst part?
We call it marketing.

The flip side for the artist is this:

Without even realising it, you find yourself spending more time entertaining the digital marketplace than actually creating the work.

It becomes less about the work itself, and more about the performance of the work.

At some point, you realise —
you’re no longer doing the work it actually takes to make something great.

Congratulations.

You’ve upgraded from artist to content creator.

Sorry.

I mean downgraded, of course.

And yet, just when it couldn’t get faster, louder, or more demanding —
AI arrived.

---

In our squatted rehearsal room next to The Tacheles in 2007, Berlin

6 We Robotised Ourselves — Before The Machines Even Had The Chance.

The advent of AI put our already-accelerated world into hyperspeed.

We were drowning in content long before ChatGPT was unleashed.

I know there are boons to AI — but I’m not here to talk about that.

I’m in a Nietzschean mood, and I’m sick of being told to adapt or die.

No.

I may just choose neither.

I won’t adapt. But I won’t die either.

Because as I see it — and I say this with certainty — an AI dystopia is already arriving.
And here’s the worst part: it’s not destroying the world.
It’s flattening it.

AI hasn’t elevated us. It’s just accelerated the average.

That’s not the usual take — I know.
Isn’t AI making things better? Cleaner? More perfect?

No. It’s flooded the online space with the voice of a monochromatic ghostwriter.

Large Language Models have mathematicised language.
Every sentence becomes a fill-in-the-blank.
Even as I write this — a line I’ve wrestled from deep, uninterrupted thought — I feel that dubious shadow:
Will someone assume it’s been generated?

Well, call me old-fashioned,
but I prefer the hellfire of tumbling through my own being to find an idea.

Yes, I feel grief.

Language — this miraculous emanation of the universe,
Forged from stardust and rendered through blood, decay, and biological struggle —
has been turned into predictive text.

Did you give us language back?

Or did you steal it from us?

That’s just the point.

Spotify — another tech company — stole the world’s music and sold it back to us at a discount, getting rich in the process.
Now LLMs have done the same for language.

Even work that’s real, written by idiot humans like me who sit down and bleed into the page — gets thrown into the bin of believability.

And yes, this piece — long, slow, hard-fought — is technically content.
But it’s real. It cost me something.

Time, effort, and circular thoughts worked through until they express what’s actually trying to emerge from the pit of the stomach.

I feel an unbelievable gratitude for my 25 years of artistic struggle.
My journey is mapped, my voice is stamped, and my history is written.

Because yes — in this new hall-of-mirrors reality, to have a history is a privilege.

It means you existed before doubt was cast on every word, every origin, every intention.

Before the whole damn system started questioning what was real in the first place.

And yet — the artist must still contend with their own vaporisation.
Even as they resist it.
Even as they continue making the absurd choice to create something real.

So what then does the writer of books feel in this new paradigm?

It’s not just the speed of replication.
It’s not just that a monkey with a prompt can now draft passable copy.

It’s that even original thought is met with scepticism.

And that’s a very uncomfortable place to be.

What’s the point of struggling toward something true,
when a million knock-offs can be conjured in the time it takes to blink?

Here’s the answer that keeps me going — the reason I still sit down to do the work.

It’s because what the work does to you cannot be replicated.

The struggle to create something,
the battle to find your voice,
the slow birth of what we call style —
those are things that can be copied on the surface.

But they cannot give someone the internal transformation they give the person who earned them.

That’s the difference.

Last year, a close friend asked me if I was okay.

He said:
“Your newsletter’s taken a dark turn. It’s all altars, demons, and blood sacrifices.”

It made me laugh.
We were deep in some lost bohemian night.

But I tried to explain:
No, I wasn’t literally in hell.
But working through my writer’s block felt like it.
I used myth because I didn’t have modern language to describe the experience.

Eventually, I did get to the songs.

But not by climbing out of the darkness.
I didn’t escape it upwards, instead — I took a pickaxe to the basement.

And under the cracks, I found something I can only describe as the river of life.

That’s where I found the songs.
Not in hell — but beneath it.

That experience —
you cannot have it by generating songs with an AI.

And that’s the difference.

I know what’s forged in a human being when you commit to finding your own answers for 25 years in the arts.

So no, I don’t feel threatened in the core of my being.
Because AI cannot give, take, or replace the knowledge written into my tissues.

Charlie Parker once said:

“If you don’t live it, it won’t come out the horn.”

That’s my reminder to you:

Live it. Live it. Live it.

Don’t fake it.

Yes, use AI if you like — but for God’s sake,
keep a tap on your own soul.
Because it’s only ever yours to sell.
And you sell it every time you turn away from the question that can only be answered through living, and choose instead the borrowed version.

That version will never be yours.

It’s just a replica of you —
and sure, it might do fine while things are stable.
But mark my words:
when life applies pressure — real pressure —
that answer won’t be enough.

Because you didn’t suffer for it.
You didn’t absorb it.
You didn’t become it.

And that’s where resilience comes from.
That’s where courage is born.
And that’s where real strength is forged.

---

Tired after fly posting for the release show for “The Hermit and the Hedonist” - the night I got signed to EMI!

7 The Absurd Courage To Be Human

Everything I’ve written so far is just a caveat.

Resilience is a fine reward from the path — but it’s not compensation for the fact that many artists today are living through a moment where not only are their livelihoods being obliterated, but even the authenticity of their work is being questioned.

Just look around:

Zara is phasing out human models in favour of AI-generated avatars.
In Hollywood, VFX artists and animators are being replaced by machines.
Graphic designers are watching clients vanish to $5 generative tools.
Musicians are now in court trying to protect their voices from being cloned.
Even comic book artists are bracing for extinction as AI engines scrape their work without consent.

This isn’t some future threat. It’s happening now.

And the cost isn’t just economic —
it’s existential.

Because when the tools start mimicking your style faster than you can even form it —
what the hell is the point of anything?

This is where I find solace in the Nietzschean cackle.
I don’t know why, but amidst the terrible replication and obliteration of everything,
I feel like I’m somehow finding my feet.

As if my own path finally makes sense.

Ah yes, this is what you were training me for.

This is lightweight in comparison to the dark corridors of the spirit I have walked. I guess I feel like I’ve lived that pain already — and though there are new pain points to work through, I feel alive within the challenge.

But this isn’t about some macho urge to prove my resilience.

It’s that — on some level — I know I can help.

This why I have been diving so deeply into actually naming the problem in this essay — because the advent of AI has only compounded a much deeper erosion which started at the inception of the internet.

We are so distracted now that we live inside the problem,
but can no longer name it.

And so here we are:

The predicament of the modern artist —
and beyond that, the modern human being.

Slow down — and you vanish.
Keep up — and you burn out,
or dilute the very thing that made you an artist in the first place.

That’s the paradox.

Even the content creators are feeling it now.

Whereas artists either clocked out or trudged along —
too committed to their work to fully surrender to the absurdity —
the content creators showed up.

They adapted.
They posted.
They kept pace.

And now even they are burning out.
Because even when you play by the rules,
the rules keep changing —
and the machine keeps asking for more.

That’s why we’ve seen the burnout, the breakdowns, the disappearances
of so many YouTubers over the last year.

Because you can’t outrun a beast that’s designed to be insatiable.
There’s only one conclusion: you get devoured.

And the problem the content creator faces is different from the artist’s.

The artist — whatever their level or skill — knows their “why”.
They have to do it.
Because something in them tells them their life depends on it.

That’s the compensation.
That’s what makes the sacrifice worthwhile.

Because the reward is the process —
and the process creates the work.

For the content creator, it’s reversed.

The creation comes first.
You’re compelled to post — not to save your soul or speak to the spirit of your time,
but to keep your career afloat.

Either way, the game is rigged.

You’re doomed if you don’t participate.
You’re erased if you do.

And both paths seem to lead to the same place:
a kind of mental exhaustion, a quiet erosion of spirit.

On one side — the dehumanisation of the creator.
On the other — the death of the artwork.

First, content replaced art.
Then, speed replaced authenticity.

And where has it brought us?

To a media space drenched in a never-ending loop of sludge —
content that looks like everything, says nothing, and multiplies by the hour.

The more we scroll, the less we feel.
The more that’s made, the less it matters.

And here’s the weirdest part:

All this consumption —
the life hacks, the dopamine detoxes,
the dropshipping messiahs,
the crypto prophets,
the GPT sludge,
the teenager giving you marriage advice —
none of it brings us closer to truth, or beauty, or meaning.

It just turns reality into a simulacrum —
a copy of a copy of a copy, filtered through the funhouse mirror of the algorithm,
until all that’s left is noise.

Bright. Relentless. Hollow.

Where the hell do you find your centre in all of this?

Nietzsche saw it coming:

“The true world—we have abolished. What world is left?
The apparent one, perhaps? But no! With the true world, we have also abolished the apparent one.”

And that’s where we are now —
not just without truth,
but without even the illusion of it.

A culture so saturated in replication
that we no longer remember what was real to begin with.

And in that forgetting, something deeper dies:
the capacity to care that it’s gone.

That’s what lies at the heart of this modern emptiness.

---

After filming for the Unite Africa Foundation at an orphanage, I was asked to play some songs. Heart exploded when the curious kids circled around!

8. From Artist to Builder — The Only Way Out is Through

I know what I’ve written has a sharp edge.

But the only way to resist the unceasing noise outside — and the confusion inside — is to brandish the problem first.

So I’ve named my own pain points here.
And with them, my defiance.

I will not give my life over to the coming tide.

If that means defending by attacking, then so be it. Because one thing I’ve noticed:
after ceding our attention to algorithms, we’ve been left with a pervading sense of emptiness.

The existentialists understood this.
That you have to fight like hell for meaning.

That is the first threshold in any recovery plan.

And this — this is not the end for me.

Everywhere I look, I see how we’re mutating into passive beings,
allowing life to happen to us,
as if we’re not participants in the game.

You have to break apart the whole societal construct of victim and victor.
And get back to your own voice, your own intention, your own fucking humantiy.

Damn it — it’s time to take ownership of your soul again.
If you don’t have that, you have nothing.

You can use AI. You can figure out how to monetise, to build, to work with it or from it.

But if the cost is your soul — what are you getting the money for?
What life form is that?

You don’t get back what you’ve already given away.

That’s why I feel a new kind of fire at the edge of my spirit.

Ah, yes. There it is —
Where there was a death knell, I now feel something to live for.
Where there was quiet surrender to a world happening to me,
there is now the will to fight back.

And that fight isn’t about ego.
It’s not about mania or outrage.

It’s about the determination to live.
To say: no.
Not I.

My spirit will not be stolen, replicated, reused or repurposed.
I will become more me — not less —
because that, and only that, is the one thing they cannot steal.

Make no mistake:
the big tech companies have stolen everything.

First, it was songs.
Then it was words.
Then it was jobs.
And finally — it was your soul.

You were commodified.
And you didn’t even know it.

But here’s the paradox at the heart of it all:

It just is.

I pass the torch now to my mentor of mentors, Joseph Campbell:

“You can live in total affirmation.
As one of the Buddhist aphorisms states marvellously:
‘This world, just as it is — with all its horror, all its darkness, all its brutality — is the golden lotus world of perfection.’
If you don’t see it as such, that’s not the world’s fault.
You can’t improve what is perfect. You can only see it —
and so come to realise your own perfection.
That is to say: you can come to that depth in yourself
which is deeper than the pains and sorrows.”

I feel that affirmation even in the decay.

That burning life fire, still pulsing daily, relentlessly.

Because I know — in my spirit of spirits — that we must deal with the world just as it is.

Perhaps I’m too weak to be a revolutionary.
But I see the pain of those who tie their entire sense of identity to the hope of changing a world that was never going to bend to them.

This isn’t about surrendering to the dark.
It’s about remembering your right to live within it.

It galls me that OpenAI — and others —
have scraped the world’s artists, illustrators, writers, and publishers
to build systems like LLMs and DALL·E.

They took the blood, sweat, and soul of generations —
and turned it into a product.
A shortcut.
A feature.

There must be accountability.
And how we get there, I don’t yet know.

But in the meantime, I want to help the artist reclaim something vital:
their psychological health — their psychological fight —
in the face of the death of trademark.

And for me, that begins by giving up on the notion of rescue.

No one is coming to save you.

I still see so many artists believing that the record deal,
the publishing deal, the big break is just around the corner.

That world is gone.

You have to adapt — or you won’t go on.

We keep the dream alive
because it protects us from the brutal truth:
that we have to navigate the algorithmic-creative complex ourselves.

A machine that feeds on your art,
your time,
your soul —
and still asks you to thank it for the exposure.

I get it.

It’s easier to give yourself to the fantasy.
The fantasy of the father figure who will see your talent,
protect your product,
get you to market.

No.

As Freud put it — you have to do it yourself.

And that’s why you need to find your fire.
Your zealousness.
Your forgotten strength.

Because as Robert Frost wrote:
“The only way out is through.”

I wanted to reject it all.
And maybe, in another life, I would have.

But in the end, I chose the path of radical affirmation.

If I couldn’t kill the beast, I would learn to ride it.

That’s why I wrestle with this digital world.
That’s why I’m determined to figure out how to use it.
What I can do with it.
How to make it fun.
How to dance with it.
Even when it chooses to play the role of the devil himself.

Because at the heart of all this is a problem that feels unsolvable:

How do you evolve as an artist,
create at a high level,
and still cut through the noise of AI-driven content?

That, right there, is the challenge.

I’m working on my own answers.
I’m still breaking through my own thresholds.

And in the coming episodes, I’ll share the playbook I’m building —
not as a guru or as a guide, but as ever, as just someone else still in the fight.

So as my own thinking progresses, I’ll share what
tactics, tools, and practices I learn
for staying grounded, staying creative,
and not letting the machine steal your soul.

Until then — and as ever, my friends —

Turn it all to light and fire.

See you next time,
Jim

Release show for “Love in the Face of Fear” in 2019…and these words written with the dream to play again.

Filming a documentary on the impact of musicians during the heart of the pandemic, Novemeber 2020 - with Buero Döring (always in heart)