Music, Tech, and AI Ethics - A Beginning

Recently retired, my wife and I wanted to spend more time on the things we love (who doesn't). She had a great idea regarding listening to our album collection. We take time out of each day to play an album until the entire collection has been listened to. The album selection process involves drawing a letter out of a hat. Whatever letter we draw we listen to the associated bands until all albums from each letter have been played. When we finish a letter we repeat the process. At the current size of my album and CD collection (CDs later) this project will take almost 4 years to complete.

Initially, this project started on Facebook January 1st, 2026. After a full month of listening, we enjoyed the process so much I decide to take the project public. I have since deleted all my social media accounts in an effort to move as much of my digital footprint out of the US as possible. It's not an easy endeavour to delete everything and move any digital services out of the US, but I no longer trust US big tech companies. They have proven, at the very least, to be woefully unwilling to stand up for citizens in the face of rising authoritarianism.

This website will be a celebration of the love of music, analysis and opinion on technology, and AI ethics in an age of increasing distrust of US big tech and Government. The topics may appear unrelated, but I see music as therapy for the rising anxiety associated to a digital life increasingly dependant on AI and the technology infrastructure (platforms, apps, systems, etc) required to both function and listen to recorded music.

Over the next week my focus for this new beginning will be on migrating all my music posts from Facebook onto this platform. The data export is already complete so the remaining task is to "import" those posts here. I have the initial tagging structure sorted out. The rest is just a copy and paste exercise for the 38 existing posts. If I finish early, I'll start writing a few posts on privacy and digital sovereignty from the perspective of what the "enshittification" of tech platforms is doing to its users, intended and unintended. I spent a career implementing information management systems so I have a lot of experience with the good, the bad, and the absolute horrors of content platform implementations.

Until I settle on a non-US social platform (likely Gander in Canada when it's released) I will largely be promoting this website through my personal network via email. Getting traction without social media is a harder road but a big pillar of this project is ethics. To stay aligned with ethics, I will diligently avoid the US Big Tech extraction economy as much as possible. Like everything in life, it's all a work in progress.
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