Democracy, Culture and Ownership – who tells the story?

An article by Chris Baldwin for the Cultural Association LOS GLAYUS - Oviedo, Spain

Let me begin with a provocation. 

In our modern lives we surround ourselves with art and cultural products, images, music and media, which just like most other things, we tend to consume with little regard for where they came from or without much thought about why it may have been sold to us in the first place. Our phones bombard us with images, music and one-click stimulation. And our dopamine levels respond accordingly. We upload snippets of our lives, often ones of our most intimate moments, faces of our children and their friends, to social media platforms with little or no thought as to where it will remain, who will be able to access it, who owns it, and which AI facilitator will combine it with something else to make it… apparently… something new. We do not really know who controls these networks and strangely we no longer seem to care. Our imaginations, our dreams and desires have been digitalised, commodified, and sold on over and over again. Scared yet? Good as that was precisely my intention.

You can read the full article here.