brettworks

• A portrait of Karl Ove Knausgård.

“The act of making something is so good, so good.”

• A manifesto on electronic music production.

“Technology answers to technique. Every device and piece of gear has secrets that can be unveiled with the right technique.”

“After more than thirty years of making music with computers, we still do not know the DAW and its secrets.”

“The DAW is the most secretive of all music-making devices because it is also the most omnipresent and limitless.”

• An essay on attention.

“Real attention cannot be measured with a stopwatch or an app, and real attention — human attention — is far deeper and more complex than the ability to get stuff done. We know this, of course: The lives we long for involve going for an undisturbed walk in the park with a friend, getting lost in a book or even simply daydreaming. Life is made of these things, and they are made of attention. Armed with relentless, increasingly artificial-intelligence-driven feeds, Big Tech is conducting a successful attack on that richness, that expansiveness, that freedom. To survive it, and to build something better, we need to rethink attention itself.”

“Does it need to be said? We are not machines. Our lives are not data problems that can be quantitatively optimized. And the actual human ability to attend is something much more expansive and much more beautiful than a tool for filtering information or extending our time on task. True attention lies at the heart of personhood: reason, judgment, memory, curiosity, responsibility, the feeling of a summer day, the burying of our dead. All of these require and activate our presence. As for mental functions that can be measured and indexed — and ultimately bought and sold — they are precisely the kind of attention we need to escape.”