STRICT DISCIPLINARIAN

Dick Pountain/Idealog 250/05 May 2015 11:23

After photography my main antidote to computer-trauma is playing the guitar. Recently I saw Stefan Grossman play live for the first time at London's King's Place, though I've been learning ragtime picking from his books for the last 30 years. He played his acoustic Martin HJ-38 through a simple PA mike, and played it beautifully. Another idol of mine is Bill Frisell, who could hardly be more different in that he employs the whole gamut of electronic effects, on material from free jazz, through bluegrass to surf-rock. Dazzled by his sound I just purchased a Zoom G1on effects pedal from Amazon, and am currently immersed in learning how to deploy its 100 amazing effects.

The theme I'm driving at here is the relationship between skill, discipline and computer-assistance. There will always of course be neo-Luddites who see the computer as the devil's work that destroys all skills, up against pseudo-modernists who believe that applying a  computer to any banal material will make it into art. Computers are labour-savers: they can be programmed to relieve humans of certain repetitive tasks and thereby reduce their workload. But what happens when that repetitive task is practising to acquire a skill like painting or playing a musical instrument?

The synth is a good example. When I was a kid learning to play the piano took years, via a sequence of staged certificates, but now you can buy a keyboard that lets you play complex chords and sequences after merely perusing the manual. Similarly if you can't sing in tune a not-that-inexpensive Auto-Tune box will fudge that for you. Such innovations have transformed popular music, and broadened access to performing it, over recent decades. Does that make it all rubbish? Not really, it's only around 80% rubbish, like every other artform. The 20% that isn't rubbish is made by people who still insist on discovering all the possibilities and extending their depth, whether that's in jazz, hiphop, r&b, dance or whatever.

Similar conflicts are visible with regard to computer programming itself. I've always maintained that truly *great* programming is an art, structurally not that unlike musical composition, but the vast majority of the world's software can't be produced by great programmers. One of my programming heroes, Prof Tony Hoare, has spent much of his career advocating that programming should become a chartered profession, like accountancy, in the interests of public safety since so much software is now mission-critical. What we got instead is the "coding" movement which encourages absolutely everybody to start writing apps using web-based frameworks: my favourite Guardian headline last month was "Supermodels join drive for women to embrace coding". Of course it's a fine idea to improve everyone's understanding of computers and help them make their own software, but such a populist approach doesn't teach the really difficult disciplines involved in creating safe software: it's more like assembling Ikea furniture, and if that table-leg has an internal flaw your table's going to fall over.

Most important of all though, there's a political-economic aspect to all this. Throughout most of history, up until the last century, spending years acquiring a skill like blacksmithing, barbering, medicine, singing, portrait painting might lead to some sort of a living income, since people without that skill would pay you to perform it for them. Computerised deskilling now threatens that income stream in many different fields. Just to judge from my own friends, the remuneration of graphic designers, illustrators, photographers and animators has taken a terrible battering in recent years, due to digital devices that opened up their field and flooded it with, mostly mediocre, free content. The arguments between some musicians and Spotify revolves around a related issue, not of free content but of the way massively simplified distribution reduces the rates paid.

We end up crashing into a profound contradiction in the utilitarian philosophy that underlies all our rich Western consumer societies, which profess to seek the greatest good for the greatest number: does giving more and more people ever cheaper, even free, artefacts trump the requirement to pay those who produce such artefacts a decent living? I think any sensible solution probably revolves around that word "decent": what exactly constitutes a decent living, and who or what decides it? Those rock stars who rail against Spotify aren't sore because their children are starving, but because of some diminution in what most would regard as plutocratic mega-incomes. Some people will suggest that it's market forces that sort out such problems (and of course that's exactly what Spotify is doing). I've no idea what Stefan Grossman or Bill Frisell earn per annum, but I don't begrudge them a single dollar of it and I doubt that I'm posing much of threat to either of them  (yet).