Threading the Needle

The satisfying sound of my fabric scissors cutting through a beautiful material. My eyes trained on the seam allowance I meticulously traced as I guide the fabric under my presser foot. Shutting down my devices, lighting incense and candles, and embroidering a little talisman. So much of the peace in my life recently has come from fiber arts.

There was a Twitter-velocity trend recently of using AI image generators to hallucinate embroidery-style artwork. Soon after, my preferred AI tool added an "embroidery" preset. Like every recent trend in AI, it had stopped being a thing moments after it had started being a thing.

I don't know. It's pretty cool. We got some cool images out of the trend. One click. It's certainly infinity-times higher fidelity than the crude flowers and stars and runes I'm learning to embroider by hand. Higher fidelity that I could even hope to produce if invested in a commercial-graded digital embroidery machine.

The slowness is the point, I think to myself as I spend countless hours sitting at my craft table in silence making a garment I could get for a few dollars on SHEIN. The slowness is the point. The joy comes from having one activity in my day that isn't mediated by a screen. From making the choice to be present with what I'm making or writing or cooking rather than doing everything with the omnipresent kinda-background-but-really-actually-foreground intrusion of social media or Netflix or a YouTube video than I'm not-really-watching.

Similarly, the fidelity of AI-generated "music" has improved beyond comprehension in the past year; certainly beyond what we could have imagined it would be in the relative pre-history of Magenta ↗(opens in new tab). If you so wish, you can make music neither touching an instrument or vibrating a vocal cord; not even programming a beat in a piano roll or choosing a sample from Splice.

I'm so, so conscious of sounding like an old woman yelling at the clouds. From digital embroidery machines and cameras to samplers and drum machines, our creative arts have thrived and grown from new technology. And yet, increasingly, there is something missing for me.

It's a weird time to be a musician. It's a weird time to be a technologist. It's a weird time to be a human.

As a person with a computer job, I have to wonder how to risk manage this weird part of my career where the only certainty is that knowledge work—if it still exists in 5 years time—is about to look very different. As an artist and musician, I have to wonder how to keep going. How it possibly makes sense to write lyrics and record instruments & voices when any song imaginable is functionally one prompt away.

The answer is to trust in the things that can't be measured and can't be automated. The things that make the least sense when chugging directly from the kegs of Cerebral Valley (vom; sorry) AI kool aid.

Trusting in the healing of finding lyrics that perfectly capture the deepest feelings that you otherwise couldn't articulate. The catharsis of singing them at the top of your lungs. The two-way energetic transmissions between performer and witness; the sanctity of attention and eye contact.

The best things in life are slow, are offline, and are often free. Kneeling down on your yoga mat for a cat-cow is slow, offline and free. As is sitting down to meditate, as is running in the woods. As is embroidering a little talisman by candlelight, as is singing a brand new song to one other human. Writing the first draft of your essay with a fountain pen on your favorite paper instead of in a whizzy GPT-connected word processor.

These acts are not for sale in any meaningful way. They may not scale. They may lack the wow-factor of typing a prompt into the latest Hugging Face model, or the possibility of riches from capitalizing on this moment in AI.

But they do bring us closer to ourselves. As so much changes around us and technology permeates yet more of our lives in novel, exciting, and terrifying ways, let's not forget the humble & simple paths to happiness.

It's often as simple as letting your phone run out of battery and threading a needle.