Imagine me, in business casual (barely), sitting in a dirty Brooklyn dive bar to see one of the DIY punk bands I’ve been following for all of three months. I can barely stay still from the excitement. Yet, I notice, like I always have, that I stick out like a sore thumb. I’m not referring to the business casual attire; we all do what we can to survive in the city.
Regardless, I’ve started to challenge myself and ask, “Do I really stick out at these shows?” Partly because I always end up leaving with a new friend when I attend a show alone.
And mostly because whenever I go to a show, the band’s lead singer stops their set to discuss a political issue that belongs to the ideologies of the left. As a black woman, this makes me feel safe. As an avid music fan and someone who is hyper-fixated on the history of anything and everything, I’m intrigued.
Uncovering Punk’s Anti-Establishment Roots
For the next few days after the concert, I did a deep dive into punk music and its anti-establishment roots. In the mid-70s, the punk subculture emerged in the United Kingdom and New York.
The punk movement began among teens and young adults looking for a more combative approach to rebelling against societal norms compared to the tamer peace and love movements of the 60s and early 70s. Punk music is and has always been grounded in counterculture — from fighting for working-class inequality to fashion to non-conformity in the realm of self-expression.
I discovered that you can’t separate punk music from politics, even in the slightest.
@mycelium_queen Replying to @mycelium_queen ♬ original sound - Mycelium Queen 🦋
Death Versus Bad Brain
As soon as I was old enough to go to shows alone, I submerged myself in the DIY scene. I had no idea what I was doing, I scoured the internet to find “small concerts,” as I called them, in Boston, where I went to high school.
I identified with punk for myself. But when I made the connection between punk and politics, I opened myself up to a whole new world of music.
Lyrics like: “Politicians in my eyes / They could care less about you / they could care less about me as long as they are to end the place they want to be,” from the band Death — considered to be the pioneers of punk music as a genre — spoke to me.
I was even more pleased that the actual founders of the genre — originally a jazz fusion turned hardcore punk band called Bad Brain — were Black Musicians.
I once declared that I’m only an amalgamation of those who came before me, so hearing this quite literally brought tears to my eyes (I’m so far from joking, it’s almost funny again). At my favorite DIY punk, emo, and rock concerts I belong just as much as anyone else.
I’ve always loved that punk music and its subculture take a stand for its listeners.
Feminist Punk: The Riot Grrrl Movement
Shortly after fully immersing myself in the scene, I was introduced to Bikini Kill and the Riot Grrrl movement. Emerging in the early 90’s, the Riot Grrl movement came about out of necessity for a space for women in the punk scene. Riot Grrrl directly combats sexism and works to normalize female anger and sexuality.
In 2023, I began filming a documentary about Boone, North Carolina — a small town rich in music, culture, and activism, especially for the LGBTQ+ community. My production team and I soon noticed that the conversations solely about the music scene quickly became political, especially for Babe Haven, a Riot Grrrl band hailing from Boone.
I now have the pleasure of calling the band members my friends. They’re an integral part of the history of punk and the Riot Grrrl movement, from their songs about objectification of women, like “Uppercut” and “Daddy’s Little Girl” to firsthand accounts of the band from those who believe that punk music has always been all about men — particularly white men.
“Riot grrrl is the way we dress, the way we talk, and the way we stand up for ourselves and other feminine folk. It’s aggressively inclusive, and that’s why we’re so drawn to it. We have on one hand, this outlet for our collective anger and grief, and on the other, we have this platform for queer and feminine celebration.” – Babe Haven
Jonathan Courchesne
Through the Looking Glass
Now, my eyes are peeled for signs and signals of the punk scene and its connection to politics. From the moment of silence for Gaza at a November concert to the New Jersey-based punk band Funeral Doors’ moment of silence for Gaza, and Brooklyn-based band Talon in February.
I remember standing in the crowds at that concert in February as the business casual people entered the bar, expecting a relaxing after-work drink with some light chatter in the background. I watched their faces as they slowly backed out of the door. While they heard howling, the fans listented to Juni, the lead singer of Funeral Doors, screaming, “F*ck trans genocide!”
Everyone was immersed in the safe space the band had provided us. Somewhere in the crowd, there was someone — or 3 or 4 individuals — struggling to truly be who they are. And — if only for a brief moment — they felt like they belonged.
Lead singer of Funeral DoorsERYNN WAKEFIELD
Inevitable Misunderstanding
Although there are essential conversations happening within the punk and DIY communities about what it means to be a part of the subculture, we still have work to do. Recently, I had an extremely jarring experience as I was peacefully scrolling through TikTok.
I came across a string of videos about right-wing punks trying to claim the subculture for themselves. Soon after my feed was flooded with stitches and clapbacks from left-wing people explaining the subculture of punk music and the inability to remove it from left-leaning political discourse.
@c4b1n_1n_th3_wxxds_ Sorry i look kinda bad 💀 ive bad a rough few weeks . . . . . . #punk #punkstyle #punkclothing #punkrock #punkfashion #crustpunk #folkpunk #queer #gay #lgbtq #pride #leftist #leftistpolitics #anarchism #Anarchy #Socialism #anarchocommunism ♬ original sound - C4b1n 🔻
Punk's Proclamation: A Movement Rooted in People’s Power
I’ve said it time and time again: artists must reflect the times. It’s both comforting and empowering that this genre I love so much does not deny me. And it wouldn’t be what it is without me. As silly as it sounds, I often return to a meme, one that declares that people — if they choose to create — need to carry the burden of the world they’re living in. This has only proven to be true.
Punk music and the subculture behind it aren’t merely screaming and studded belts from your local Hot Topic (if they’re a thing anymore). The punk scene highlights the struggles of the working class, sheds light on political issues relating to marginalized groups, fosters community, and fights for what’s right.
Punk music has always held a space for me; all I had to do was claim it.
@wormtriip via Instagram
Researchers Have Created an AI Too Dangerous to Release. What Will Happen When It Gets Out?
The GPT-2 software can generate fake news articles on its own. Its creators believe its existence may pose an existential threat to humanity. But it could also present a chance to intervene.
Researchers at OpenAI have created an artificial intelligence software so powerful that they have deemed it too dangerous for public release.
The software, called GPT-2, can generate cohesive, coherent text in multiple genres—including fiction, news, and unfiltered Internet rants—making it a prime candidate for creating fake news or fake profiles should it fall into the wrong hands.
Fears like this led the Elon Musk-founded company OpenAI to curtail the software's release. "Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model," they announced in a blog post. "As an experiment in responsible disclosure, we are instead releasing a much smaller model for researchers to experiment with, as well as a technical paper."
In addition to writing a cohesive fictional story based on Lord of the Rings, the software wrote a logical scientific report about the discovery of unicorns. "In a shocking finding, scientist discovered a herd of unicorns living in a remote, previously unexplored valley, in the Andes Mountains," the software wrote. "Even more surprising to the researchers was the fact that the unicorns spoke perfect English. The scientist named the population, after their distinctive horn, Ovid's Unicorn. These four-horned, silver-white unicorns were previously unknown to science."
This journalistic aptitude sparked widespread fears that AI technologies as sophisticated as the GPT-2 could influence upcoming elections, potentially generating unfathomable amounts of partisan content in a single instant. "The idea here is you can use some of these tools in order to skew reality in your favor," said University of Washington professor Ryan Calo. "And I think that's what OpenAI worries about."
Elon Musk quit OpenAI in 2018, but his legacy of fear and paranoia regarding AI and its potential evils lives on. The specter of his caution was likely instrumental in keeping GPT-2 out of the public sphere. "It's quite uncanny how it behaves," echoed Jack Clark, policy director of OpenAI, when asked about his decision to keep the new software under locks.
The fears of Elon MuskImage via express.co.uk
In a world already plagued by fake news, cat-fishing, and other forms of illusion made possible by new technology, AI seems like a natural next step in the dizzying sequence of illusion and corruption that has rapidly turned the online world from a repository of cat videos (the good old days) to today's vortex of ceaselessly reproduced lies and corrupted content. Thinkers like Musk have long called for resistance against AI's unstoppable growth. In 2014, Musk called AI the single largest "existential threat" to humanity. That same year, the late physicist Stephen Hawking ominously predicted that sophisticated AI could "spell the end of the human race."
Stephen Hawking's apocalyptic visionsImage via longroom.com
But until AI achieves the singularity—a level of consciousness where it achieves and supersedes human intelligence—it is still privy to the whims of whoever is controlling it. Fears about whether AI will lend itself to fake news are essentially fears of things humans have already done. All the evil at work on the Internet has had a human source.
When it comes down to the wire, for now, AI is a weapon.
When AI is released into the world, a lot could happen. AI could become a victim, a repository for displaced human desire. Some have questioned whether people should be allowed to treat humanoid creatures in whatever ways they wish to. Instances of robot beheadings and other violent behaviors towards AI hint towards a darker trend that could emerge should AI become a free-for-all, a humanoid object that can be treated in any way on the basis of its presumed inhumanity.
Clearly, AI and humanity have a complex and fundamentally intertwined relationship, and as we all become more dependent on technology, there is less of a clear line dividing the human from the robotic. As a manmade invention, AI will inevitably emulate the traits (as well as the stereotypes) of the people who created it. It could also take on the violent tendencies of its human creators. Some thinkers have sounded the alarm about this, questioning the dearth of ethics in Silicon Valley and in the tech sphere on the whole. Many people believe that AI (and technology in general) is fundamentally free of bias and emotion, but a multitude of examples have shown that this is untrue, including instances where law enforcement software systems displayed racist bias against black people (based on data collected by humans).
AI can be just as prejudiced and close-minded as a human, if not more so, especially in its early stages where it is not sophisticated enough to think critically. An AI may not feel in and of itself, but—much like we learn how to process the world from our parents—it can learn how to process and understand emotions from the people who create it, and from the media it absorbs.
Image via techno-pundit.blogspot.com
After all, who could forget the TwitterBot who began spewing racist, anti-Semitic rants mere hours after its launch—rants that it, of course, learned from human Twitter users? Studies have estimated that 9 to 15 percent of all Twitter accounts are bots—but each one of these bots had to be created and programmed by a human being. Even if the bot was not created for a specific purpose, it still learns from the human presences around it.A completely objective, totally nonhuman AI is kind of like the temperature absolute zero; it can exist only in theory. Since all AI is created by humans, it will inevitably take on human traits and beliefs. It will perform acts of evil when instructed to, or when exposed to ideologies that can inspire it to. It can also learn morality if its teachers choose to imbue it with the ability to tell right from wrong.
Image via cio.com
Their quandary may not be so different from the struggle parents face when deciding whether to allow their children to watch R-rated movies. In this case, both the general public and the AIs are the children, and the scientists, coders, and companies peddling new inventions are the parents. The people designing AIs have to determine the extent to which they can trust the public with their work. They also have to determine which aspects of humanity they want to expose their inventions to.
OpenAI may have kept their kid safe inside the house a little longer by freezing the GPT-2, but that kid is growing—and when it goes out into the world, it could change everything. For better or worse, at some point, super-intelligent AI is going to wind up in the public's hands. Now, during its tender, formative stages, there is still a chance to shape it into whom it's going to be when it arrives.
Eden Arielle Gordon is a writer and musician from New York City. Talk to her about AI on Twitter @edenarielmusic.